This qualitative study aims to explore the ways in which digital dictionaries andmachine translation are being used to help students learning Swedish as a secondlanguage (L2). The study focuses on teacher’s reasoning for the use of these tools andthe problems they face in trying to implement the guidelines specified around the useof such tools in the Swedish curriculum. Through interviews with teachers of Swedishas a second language, and phenomenographic analysis, the study shows that mostteachers use these tools as a lexical aid rather than a steppingstone to implementingstrategies which facilitate the symbiotic uses of both the students first and secondlanguages in their linguistic development. This due to the controversial issue of usingmachine translation as a pedagogical tool in second language acquisition. Many of theteachers mentioned the shortcomings of both the tools and their own ability to usethem as a problem in implementing these tools. The teachers also had difficultiesdeciding which resources would be best in helping their students develop theirlanguage skills in the target language. Possible solutions for this problem would befurther training for teachers in the uses of machine translation and in which strategiesto teach their students to make didactic use of translation tools like Google Translate.