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attempts to find uses for MT as aids for beginning language learners using beginning Spanish students …Google Translate, Bing Translator, Yahoo Babel Fish) seems to achieve
results that can be deemed useful, if not elegant yet, for some communication purposes, particularly between close related languages. Anecdotal classroom evidence points to the fact that, against the explicit advice of teachers, some students recognize having written first the text in their mother language, entered it into a machine translation engine (usually Google Translate), then fixing the output and presenting the final text as their own work. As machine translation improves, this trend cannot but rise.
Rather than condemning this practice, this research investigates whether there could be room for
machine translation in the language classroom. For language learning, the machine generated translation could offer a type of scaffolding upon which the individual student can project their grammatical knowledge on the other language. The teacher could find in it also a common platform for a class activity.
asked learners of Spanish at beginner and early intermediate levels to perform classroom like writing
assignments, in some cases directly into their target language, in others aiding themselves from a MT. ....The results from our small sample seem to support that MT can help the beginner and early intermediate learner to communicate more and better. Yet, there seems to be more effort required, as measured by the number of pauses, when writing directly into L2. There seems to be also more engagement with the task, thus more learning, as measured by the number of successful and unsuccessful edits, when writing directly into L2.
Other issues that have been raised in the literature on MT for language learning in regards to
advanced language learners, for example in relation to detecting inappropriate use of it by passing the machine’s output as their own [5, 8] will need also to be considered in regards to beginner learners..
References [2] Higgins, John and Tim Johns (1984). Computers in language learning. Adison-Wesley: Aylesbury. [3] Kliffer, M.D. (2005, May). An experiment in MT post-editing by a class of intermediate/advanced French majors. In Proceedings of EAMT, 10th Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary. [4] La Torre, M.D. (1999). A web-based resource to improve translation skills. Re CALL, 11(3), 41–49. [5] Mc Carthy, B. (2004) Does online machine translation spell the end of take-home translation assignments? CALL-EJ Online 6.1. Available at www.clec.ritsumei.ac.jp/english/callejonline/9- 1/mccarthy.html. [6] Niño, A. (2008). Evaluating the use of machine translation post-editing in the foreign language class. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 21:1, 29-49. [7] Somers, H. (2003). Machine translation in the classroom. In Somers, H. (ed.), Computers and translation. A translator’s guide. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 319-341. [8] Somers, H. (2005). Detecting Innapropriate Use of Free Online Machine Tranbslation by Language Students – A Special Case of Plagiarism Detection. In Proceedings of the 11th annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, Oslo, Norway, 41-48.