Mistake detection method in Chinese-Japanese translation for Japanese learning support

Abstract

When Chinese students study Japanese, they sometimes find it difficult to understand the grammar of Japanese correctly because Chinese and Japanese use the same Chinese characters in a different way. Our research focuses on the students' exercises of translating Chinese sentences into Japanese, and enables students to acquire correct knowledge based on translated sentences. For this objective, our Chinese-Japanese translation process is divided into three steps: translation of words, ordering of words, and addition of functional expressions to complete the sentence. The system compares translated sentences written by students with the correct answer preset in the system and specifies the step in which students might be mistaken. Then, the system gives a result of evaluating the translated sentence with the explanation of incorrect translation. Since the usage of Japanese functional expressions is the most difficult for the Chinese students translating a sentence, our system supports students learning Japanese functional expressions by considering the factors of the mistaken functional expressions. According to the mistake information, the system selects another question from the question database, which has the same factor as the mistaken functional expression. Experimental results showed that our system was effective in detecting the mistakes, especially mistakes of words and Japanese functional expressions.