A Survey of Translation Learners’ Uses and Perceptions of Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper reports a questionnaire-based survey that was designed to investigate how a group of Chinese translation learners used and perceived Neural Machine Translation (NMT), with a view to providing pedagogical implications for translation instruction which is being confronted with the AI-powered translation technology. 326 second- and third-year college students, who were translation learners as well as English majors from the same university in China participated in the survey. They reported high frequency of NMT use in their translation learning as well as English major learning. Instead of directly borrowing the NMT output, most of them post-edited it and/or used it as inspiration to accomplish their translation tasks. Although they evaluated NMT in a positive way and held an optimistic view toward the future of translation career, they expressed varying degrees of worry and anxiety toward their future employment and toward the use of NMT in the process of the translation learning. They clearly articulated the needs for NMT instruction in translation courses. Based on these findings, this paper proposes several ways to help reduce the learners’ worry and anxiety in translation instruction.