How Machine Translation Helps Foreign Language Students?

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study is to examine to what extent machine translation (MT) helps Chinese students who study Spanish language. Methods: Our study employed the following methods, Chinese students participated in an experiment consisting of two main tasks. The first was a short translation test measuring whether students can translate with better accuracy, fluency and complexity if they use MT. In the second task, those students had to translate without MT. In this article, we focus primarily on the translation task. Results: All participants obtained higher scores in accuracy, fluency and complexity when using MT. Conclusion: This online tool helped students complete their translation task with better spelling, terminology, mistranslation, overly literal, style guide, ambiguous translation, part of speech, addition and typography. Unfortunately, MT did not help them to avoid unit conversion errors, word order errors, functions words errors, omission errors and punctuation errors. Identifying these types of errors can help students better recognize their mistakes while learning Spanish as a second language.