Using machine translation as a parallel text to access literature for modern language learning

Abstract

Parallel texts in the form of Graded Readers have a long tradition in foreign language learning. When presenting the translation in the reader’s first language alongside the target language text, parallel texts offer access to literary texts, to their stories, characters, plot developments, and cultural content, without the need for time-consuming vocabulary or grammar searches, which would otherwise distract from the enjoyment of the texts. This chapter will describe and evaluate a teaching activity that makes use of Google translation as parallel text. This activity exploits the inconsistencies and obvious mistakes of the English machine translation as incentives to undertake close reading of the affected passages in the original foreign language text and to suggest a better translation. It allows beginners and intermediate students to benefit from the aesthetic qualities of literary texts while developing their grammatical accuracy and cultural understanding through focus on form. The evaluation of its effectiveness will be based on class discussions. Pedagogic translation exercises are used to promote deep engagement with the foreign language. At the same time, the students learn to appreciate the complexities of translation both as a process and as a product and develop a critical understanding of translated, especially machine translated, text. The opportunity to improve inferior machine translations while engaging with rich, multi-layered literary texts is shown to be a motivating activity for language learners, who also develop their digital literacy with an understanding of the shortcomings of machine translations.