Applying Google Translate in a higher education environment: Translation products assessed

Rensburg, Alta Van; Snyman, Cobus; Lotz, Susan

doi:10.2989/16073614.2012.750824

Cited by 34 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Furthermore, he added that the length of the text determines the quality of the product translated; the shorter the text, the better the result. van Rensburg et al (2012) found out that from six different text types (newspaper article, minutes, class notes, official letter, examination, and PowerPoint slides), only PowerPoint slides that have a good result when translating it from Afrikaans to English using GT. The reason behind this is because the slides do not contain full sentences; only phrases are used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2018

LLT Journal

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Writing skill is considered a difficult skill for some of the students because of limited vocabulary as well as grammatical weaknesses. Therefore, this study aims to investigate further the practice of GT in EFL essay writing as wells as its role in language learning. The study was conducted in Universitas Kristen Krida Wacana, involving eight respondents from Ukrida Department of English. Two methods were used, such as mediated-observation and interview. A writing task was given to each respondent and her/his writing process was recorded using screen-recording application. The data collected from the writing tasks were analyzed by classifying it into appropriate writing aspects while the interview data were transcribed. The result showed that students used GT in three different aspects: vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. Vocabulary became the highest used, with word-level became the first one, followed by phrase as a second highest, and sentence as the third. Spelling became the fourth highest used, while grammar was the least used among students. It is also found that GT is perceived as a dictionary as students used GT mostly in understanding vocabulary items.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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2018

LLT Journal

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“…It is generally accepted that the software is able to save time, but requires a good deal of postediting by a human expert (Austermühl 2011). van Rensburg, Snyman, andLotz (2012) found that the quality of GT was far below the expected quality in a number of academic genres. The output of Google Translate has been investigated from the perspective of whether or not it is able to produce high quality texts (for example van Rensburg, Snyman, and Lotz 2012).…”

Section: The (In)abilities Of Google Translatementioning

confidence: 97%

A double-edged sword: the merits and the policy implications of Google Translate in higher education

Mundt

Groves

2016

European Journal of Higher Education

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Machine translation, specifically Google Translate is freely available on a number of devices, and is improving in its ability to provide grammatically accurate translations. This development has the potential to provoke a major transformation in the internationalisation process at universities, since students may be, in the future, able to use technology to circumvent traditional language learning processes. While this is a potentially empowering move that may facilitate academic exchange and the diversification of the learner and researcher community at an international level, it is also a potentially problematic issue in two main respects. Firstly, the technology is at present unable to align to the socio-linguistic aspects of university level writing and may be misunderstood as a remedy to lack of writer language proficiency -a role it is not able to fulfil. Secondly, it introduces a new dimension to the production of academic work that may clash with Higher Education policy and, thus, requires legislation, in particular in light issues such as plagiarism and academic misconduct. This paper considers these issues against the background of English as a Global Lingua Franca, and argues two points. First of these is that HEIs need to develop an understanding and code of practice for the use of this technology. Secondly, three strands of potential future research will be presented.

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“…Subsequently, we decided to explore what Google Translate could offer our clients. This resulted in a study of which the first phase will be mentioned (see Van Rensburg, Snyman and Lotz (2012) for a detailed discussion hereof), and the second and third phases will be described in this article. In addition to our own research objective of investigating the usefulness of MT According to Google (Google n.d.(a)), the texts or corpora from which its system "learns" come from books, organisations such as the UN, and the Internet.…”

Section: The Context Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first three phases of the study will be discussed in section 4. Such enquiries prompted us to conduct the first phase of our study (Van Rensburg et al 2012) in which the quality of translation products created in 2010 by Google Translate, a translation student and a professional translator were assessed and compared. Six different text types were translated, one document each from Afrikaans into English and another from English into Afrikaans.…”

Section: The Context Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Translation technology explored: Has a three-year maturation period done Google Translate any good?

Lotz

Rensburg

2014

SPiL Plus

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Language users in multilingual environments who are trying to make sense of the linguistic challenges they face may well regard the advent of online machine translation (MT) applications as a welcome intervention. Such applications have made it possible for virtually anyone to try their hand at translation -with minimum effort, at that. However, the usefulness of the output of these translation applications varies. The empirical research described in this article is a continuation of an investigation into the usefulness of MT in a higher education context. In 2010, Afrikaans and English translations generated by Google Translate and two human translators, based on the same set of source texts, were evaluated by a panel of raters by means of a holistic assessment tool. In 2011 and 2012, the same set of source texts was translated again with Google Translate, and those translations have since been evaluated in exactly the same manner. The results show that the quality of Google Translate's output has improved over the three years. Subsequently, an error analysis was performed on the translation set of one text type by means of a second assessment tool. Despite an overall improvement in quality, we found that the 2012 translation contained unexpected new errors. In addition, the error analysis showed that mistranslation posed the largest risk when using this MT application. Users of MT should, therefore, understand the risks of their choice and that some text types and contexts are better suited to MT than others. Armed with this knowledge, translators and multilingual communities can make informed decisions regarding MT and translation technology in general.Translation technology explored 237 http://spilplus.journals.ac.za in a higher education context, we chose to incorporate a client perspective in our research, where possible, and compare and consider factors that we observed were important to clients. What is Google Translate and how does it do what it does?Google Translate is a free online application, offered by Google Inc., that allows users to have words, sentences, documents and even websites translated in an instant.The translations are generated by Google Translate computer systems and are based on patterns found in large amounts of text, rather than sets of rules for a particular language. Although human language users cope with rules and their exceptions, those exceptions have proved to be problematic for rule-based MT. One way around the problems that exceptions to language rules pose for systems aiming to translate is to let the systems discover the rules for themselves -a principle of statistical MT. A system "learns" by analysing the source texts and target texts of documents that have already been translated by human translators.

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Applying Google Translate in a higher education environment: Translation products assessed

Cited by 34 publications

References 9 publications

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A double-edged sword: the merits and the policy implications of Google Translate in higher education

Translation technology explored: Has a three-year maturation period done Google Translate any good?

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