Google Translate & Modern Languages Education

Conference Programme

Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies

University of Nottingham
29 June 2018
 Google Translate & Modern Languages Education
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies
University of Nottingham
29 June 2018
Google Translate (GT) has become an institution in machine translation that has been claimed
by its provider to be developing at great pace to achieve ever higher degrees of accuracy.
Because GT is freely available on the internet and has its own app on computers, tablets and
smartphones, it is accessible anywhere the Internet and Google services are available, and it
easily enables users to render stretches of one language into another with outcomes of varying
quality and comprehensibility.
Because this technology is so readily available and user-friendly, it can be quite safely
assumed that people will use it, also in language learning. As such, GT has become a player
in education at all levels. For instance, it would allow a beginning learner of French to translate
a reading exercise into their first language to potentially facilitate comprehension.
Given the wide range of potential uses (to positive or adverse effect) GT needs to be
considered in the context of education from angles such as its actual current abilities,
pedagogical implications, ethics, institutional policies especially from the perspective of
teachers and learners. In this light, this event brings together the work of speakers from a wide
range of backgrounds to make a significant contribution to the discussion that the topic
warrants.
The topics covered at this event cover considerations of Google Translate in the light language
acquisition, translator training, autonomous learning, user perceptions, translation quality and
several other important topic areas.
The event is of relevance to students, secondary and tertiary teachers, translators and
researchers of various strands in modern languages, linguistics, translation and education.
Contact:
Klaus Mundt Yvonne Lee
[email protected] [email protected]

Conference attendance fees:

Students/unwaged: £10
Waged: £20

Registration closes: 22 June 2019

Conference URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/clas/google-translate-

and-modern-languages-education/index.aspx

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 How to get here

From East Midlands Airport take the Skylink bus to Nottingham and get off at Friar Lane
(app. 40mins ride). Find the official timetable here:
https://www.trentbarton.co.uk/services/skylinknottingham/timetable

At Friar Lane, walk down the road (1 minute) to either Old Market Square to take the tram, or
Angel Row to take the bus to University Park (see ‘From Nottingham city centre’ below).

Taxis also operate from East Midlands Airport and should cost around £25-30.

From any other city/airport take the train to Nottingham train station and take the tram
from there (direction Toton Lane). Get off the tram at University of Nottingham and follow the
map below.

From Nottingham city centre:

Either take the tram (direction Toton Lane) from Old Market Square, get off the tram at
University of Nottingham and follow the map below.

Or take the bus from Angel Row (close to Old Market Square, outside Nottingham Library):
 34 to University Park
o get off at University Park Campus, East Drive
 35 or 36 Chillwell/Bullwell/Long Eaton
o get off at University North Entrance
and follow the map below. These buses require exact change (£2.20 for a single ticket).

Alternatively, there are taxi stands at the train station and several locations in the city centre
(e.g. close to Friar Lane/Old Market Square/Angel Row).

On University Park, find your way to the Boots Science Building, room B24 for
registration and welcome coffee (see maps below).

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3
Bus
35/36
arrival

Boots
Science
Building

Bus 34
arrival

Tram
arrival

4
 Speakers & Panels
Each speaker slot includes the 20-minute presentation and 10 minutes Q&A

Registration & Welcome Coffee

9.00-9.45
Boots Science Building, room B34
10.00- Keynote Speaker: 10.00-
10.45 Dr Joss Moorkens Machine Translation Evolution and Quality Expectations 10.45
School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies
Dublin City University
Panel 1 Panel 2
Ana Niño Alonso Exploring the use of Google Translate for Alison Organ What do students’ chatroom discussions tell us
The University of Independent Language Learning York St John University about their attitudes to the use of Google

Boots Science Building, B34

Manchester Translate for coursework assignments?
Zixi You British university students’ attitude and usage of Nancy X. Liu Mobile Translation Experience – Current state and
Physics Building, C30

University of Central Google Translate (L2 Japanese) University of Nottingham future direction

11.00-13.00
11.00-13.00

Lancashire Ningbo
Matthew Watts
University of Nottingham
Olga Makarova Repositioning translation in SLA Stefan Vollmer Newly arrived Syrian refugees and mobile
Queen Mary University of University of Leeds communication: exploring Google Translate as
London part of quotidian and habitual digital literacy
practices
Jordi Sanchez-Carrion Developing Language Awareness through Martyn Bingham Technology for self-study – good but not good
Ulrike Bavendiek Google Translate (GT) Stephen Giles enough
University of Liverpool Harper Adams University
13.00- Lunch Break 13.00-
14.00 Boots Science Building, room B34 14.00
Panel 3 Panel 4
Klaus Mundt Google Translate in EAP: Disruptive technology Hisham Ali Google Translate and Controlled Languages:

Boots Science Building, B34

University of Nottingham or disrupting the learning process? Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Interactions and Impact
Mike Groves Doha, Qatar
Physics Building, C30

University of Birmingham

14.00-16.00
14.00-16.00

Jane Duarte Embracing diversity in a Higher Education EFL Yvonne Lee Google Translate in the Translation Classroom: a
Universidade Católica classroom with Google Translate Xiaofei Sun perspective from register theory
Portuguesa University of Nottingham
Jon Wordie Google Translate and Assessed Coursework Edyta Źrałka Google Translate in the context of culture-specific
ESP instructor for the Saudi Assignments: A Hard Taskmaster, Not a Time- University of Silesia, items
Air Force Saver Katowice, Poland
Junko Winch Google Translate and plagiarism in university Vera Sepeshvari Google Translate as a Teaching Aid for the
University of Sussex language formative assessment work Zhiganov Kazan State Course on Written Translation
Conservatoire, Kazan, Russia
16.30 Closing Remarks 16.30
Boots Science Building, room B34

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 Speakers & Abstracts

Keynote
Machine Translation Evolution and Quality Expectations

Joss Moorkens

Dublin City University

Speaker bio:

Joss Moorkens is an Assistant Professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies
at Dublin City University and a researcher at the ADAPT Centre. He has authored several journal
articles and book chapters on translation technology, post-editing of machine translation, user
evaluation of machine translation, translator precarity, and translation technology standards. He is a
coeditor of the book 'Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice', published in 2018
by Springer. He is a member of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, the European
Association for Machine Translation, and the International Association for Translation and Intercultural
Studies.

https://www.dcu.ie/salis/people/Joss-Moorkens.shtml

Panel 1
Exploring the use of Google Translate for Independent Language Learning

Ana Niño Alonso

The University of Manchester

The free availability of Google Translate (GT) on the Internet via computers, tablets and smartphones
makes it convenient for use by language students, especially at lower levels. GT has been widely listed
as an independent language learning (ILL) resource and we cannot deny its role for ongoing education.
We are aware of the fact that this developing piece of technology has limited current abilities depending
on the language pair, target language, genre, etc. However, as educators, we cannot help but wonder
what the pedagogical implications will be in relation to its use for ILL by the students. We know this
imperfect technology can greatly aid comprehension, however, its use to help with grammatical
accuracy, context adequacy, use of terminology /phraseology or colloquialisms can make some of us
wince. For these reasons, its use in the language class can be questioned and its use for ILL can be
even more worrying from the teaching perspective. This study sets to analyze how/if GT can aid
comprehension at lower levels of language attainment, how/if GT can aid language production at
intermediate levels, and whether advanced language learners actually use GT in combination with other
online language resources for their written production (e.g. writing and translation).

Speaker bio:

Ana Niño has a background in Applied Linguistics and holds a PhD in Machine Translation and
Computer Assisted Language Learning from The University of Manchester. Her research interests
revolve around translation, corpus linguistics and the pedagogy of teaching specialized languages, with
particular emphasis on the use of emerging technologies and innovative resources for independent
language learning.

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 British university students’ attitude and usage of Google Translate (L2 Japanese)

Zixi You

University of Central Lancashire

With the rapid development of language learning technology, students are exposed to more and more
digital tools to facilitate their study. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data collected through
questionnaires and interviews, this study investigates the attitude and usage of Google Translate (GT)
by modern Japanese language learners in UK higher education.

Among all digital tools investigated, GT was the only tool that was known and used by all students, with
the longest history of usage. From beginners’ level to advanced level, however, most students reported
a decreasing frequency of GT usage. Alongside students’ gaining knowledge of Japanese, dictionaries
and language corpora replaced GT to be the top popular tools, but GT remained most widely used as
the first choice when dictionary/corpora were not available.

Unlike other tools, which students got to know mostly via tutors’ recommendation and TV
advertisements, GT was known to students directly from Google. Comfortable design and easy access
were the most welcoming features of GT, scoring much higher than other digital tools investigated.
There were contradictory comments to the ‘reliability’ of GT. However, most students acknowledged
the improvement that GT had made.

Results have also shown that GT had wide application to all 23 types of learning strategies investigated,
in the categories of metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social mediation. The application
spread out relatively evenly among all categories, compared with other tools. In addition, this study also
explored new functions that students wish GT to enable: semantic field search, ‘magic glass’, etc.

Speaker bio:

Dr Zixi You has research interests in linguistics and digital humanities. During her DPhil study at Oxford
University, she took part in three internationally collaborative research projects, developing large textual
databases. She is now a lecturer in the University of Central Lancashire, teaching modern language
and translation.

Repositioning Translation in SLA

Olga Makarova

Queen Mary University of London

Until recently, translation has been a useful part of second language acquisition (SLA). It allowed
students to develop their grammar and vocabulary; it also equipped students with translation techniques
in both directions (L2-L1 and L1-L2) which was a useful professional skill. With the arrival of computer
assisted translation (CAT) tools, there seems to be no further use for translation in SLA, as it jeopardises
the integrity of the assessed coursework. There is an ongoing discussion in the translation industry
about the future of a translator’s job, so the importance of translation skills seems to be diminishing.
However, translation tasks, particularly a set of translation rules, can be used in class to develop
students’ language competence. Translation also remains an essential part of language tests in
employment. The main principle of translation – ‘translate ideas, not words’ – suggests a way of
teaching grammar/vocabulary/style in SLA. A CAT translated text and an original presented together
in class can be utilised as a starting point for a text analysis and language instruction. A CAT text,
processed by a teacher in advance, can be analysed for accuracy (grammar/vocabulary) and adequacy
(style). Comparison of source and target texts helps to reveal and explain translation rules
(‘antonymous’ translation’; ‘cause and effect’ translation etc). This should enhance students’ ability to
paraphrase which is an indication of a good language competence. Another useful skill which can be
developed is the post-editing of CAT texts; the latter should be offered at C1-C2 levels of language
competence or to Heritage students.

Speaker bio:

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Dr Olga Makarova FHEA. Teaching and Research Fellow in Russian, School of Languages, Linguistics
and Film, Queen Mary University of London. At Queen Mary since 1999; teaching Russian at all levels,
undergraduate and postgraduate (including MA in History and Theory of Translation). Professional
translator with 5 translated books published in Russia; contributor to Google Translate.

Developing Language Awareness through Google Translate (GT)

Jordi Sanchez-Carrion

Ulrike Bavendiek

University of Liverpool

Metalinguistic awareness and knowledge about language are often considered to be beneficial for the
language learning process. A successful translation is indicative of such linguistic understanding and
sensitivity, since it starts with the salient features of the source text to make informed choices in the
translation. GT is currently not able to identify and consider most textual features in the source text, a
limitation that can be exploited to raise awareness of the challenges of (literary) texts. The paper will
report on a project that aims to develop and assess sensitivity of the forms and functions of language
through critical reflection on the limitations of GT. First year Modern Language students on a Language
Awareness module learn to describe the linguistic features of their foreign language, from phonetics
and phonology through to pragmatics. The module culminates in an introduction to translation, where
students are asked to reflect on the difficulties that a chosen foreign language text may pose for the
translator. A GT in English (the students’ mother tongue) is then analysed critically, commented on and
improved by the students. The paper will show how working with GT illustrates the difficulties a
translator may face when translating literary texts. While the course does not primarily aim to develop
the students’ translation skills and students are not expected to provide an acceptable translation of the
very challenging source text, working with GT nevertheless raises their awareness of translation
difficulties, pitfalls and the limitations of GT.

Speaker bio:

Jordi Sánchez is a Spanish Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He has been teaching Spanish as a
foreign language and translation in different institutions for several years of which the last three have
been at the mentioned university.

Ulrike Bavendiek is a Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has been
teaching German language and linguistics in HE institutions in Germany, Japan and the UK for 25
years.

Panel 2
What do students’ chatroom discussions tell us about their attitudes to the use of Google
Translate for coursework assignments?

Alison Organ

York St John University

This paper will present the interim findings of a research project on students’ use of Google Translate
(GT) for L2 production. Data was collected from online student forums to gauge the extent to which
students spontaneously discuss the use of GT for assignments, and what their posts reveal about their
attitudes. Although the main focus of the project will be students’ use of GT at degree level, it is valuable
to determine how widespread its use is among GCSE and A level students before they reach university.

The interim findings reveal that use of GT for assignments has been accepted practice among students
over the last decade, reflecting behaviour shown in Clifford et al (2013) and Farzi (2016); however, their
mixed attitudes to this usage also echo Bower’s (2010) findings. Some respondents discourage the

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original poster (OP) from using GT because of the likelihood of detection, and there is considerable
discussion as to whether teachers can ‘spot’ it or not. Others take a more moralising tone, accusing the
OP of laziness, although many offer advice such as post-editing or using better tools. Some, however,
claim that they have used it extensively without being detected, echoing Somers et al (2006) and Groves
& Mundt (2015) in concluding that GT can produce language equivalent to that of a student of average
ability.

These interim findings would appear to confirm that use of GT is prevalent among school-age students,
and should help to inform the debate regarding universities’ response to this behaviour.

Speaker bio:

Alison Organ, Senior Lecturer, School of Languages and Linguistics, York St John University. Alison
started her career as a secondary school teacher before taking a career break, during which she
qualified and worked as a translator. She then moved into higher education, and currently lectures in
French, German and Translation, and supervises PGCE trainees. She is a Senior Fellow of the HEA.

Mobile Translation Experience – Current state and future direction

Nancy X. Liu

University of Nottingham Ningbo

Matthew Watts

University of Nottingham

This paper will explore the new phenomenon of Mobile Translation (MoT), analysing the user
experience of MT apps and apps which enable crowdsourcing of post-editing and translation, both from
the perspective of professional translators and non-professional translators. In spite of the ubiquity and
seamlessness of mobile technology (laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc.), MoT is still in its preliminary
stages, with limited use and study of mobile devices in the field of translation and how users engage
with translation on mobile devices. It will begin by introducing the relationship between translation and
mobile devices exploring how technological developments have enabled more and more users to
engage with translation on mobile devices.

It will then provide an overview of the mobile translation experience through presenting and analysing
some of the previous, small-scale studies that have been conducted in areas such as:

 translator training (Arnáiz-Uzquiza & Álvarez-Álvarez, 2016; Bahri & Mahadi, 2016)
 post-editing apps (Moorkens, O’Brien, & Vreeke, 2016; Torres-Hostench, Moorkens, Brien, &
Vreeke, 2017)
 and using machine translation apps in healthcare settings (Albrecht, Behrends, Schmeer,
Matthies, & von Jan, 2013)

In addition, it will discuss potential new areas, hypotheses and questions for research within the area
of mobile translation experience and how Translation Studies could engage with this area. This could
include larger-scale studies to investigate further the way in which users engage with translation on
mobile devices, studies to understand the differences and challenges of using mobile devices for
translation or studies to examine the differences between the experiences of professional and non-
professional translators.

Speaker bio:

Nancy Xiuzhi Liu: PhD (University of Nottingham); MA in Translation and Interpreting (University of
Newcastle); Assistant Professor in English and Chinese translation and interpreting studies, School of
English, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Matthew Watts: PhD student in Translation Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the
University of Nottingham. His research focusses on mobile translation applications exploring how they
are affecting translation studies and the translation industry, as well as how users are actually engaging
with these apps and whether they might be overcoming the language barrier.

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Newly arrived Syrian refugees and mobile communication: exploring Google Translate as part
of quotidian and habitual digital literacy practices

Stefan Vollmer

University of Leeds

This presentation is informed by my doctoral research, a visual ethnography of newly arrived Syrian
refugees’ use of mobile technologies; I investigated, how three male newcomers to Leeds utilize mobile
technologies and online resources, such as multilingual Facebook groups (Vollmer, forthcoming),
translation apps (e.g. Google Translate), and multimodal social media platforms (Vollmer, 2017), to
support processes of settlement and linguistic integration. In this presentation, I scrutinize visual and
interactional data extracts (i.e. screen recordings of smartphones), which provide needed in-depth
descriptions of newcomers integrate apps such as Google Translate into their daily lives. The
multimodal and spatio-visual literacy practices that my key participants engage with on their mobile
devices are inherently diverse and complex to interpret. Here, the analytical lenses of capital (Bourdieu
1986, 1992; Blommaert, 2005) and space (Lefebvre, 1991; Oldenburg, 1996/7) inform
conceptualizations of how the quotidian mobile practices of my participants relate to and interplay with
settlement processes, such as obtaining a UK driver’s license or finding paid work in the formal and
informal economy. These analyses offer important insights into the relationship between mobile
technologies, such as Google Translate, and settlement processes within this migration context.

Speaker bio:

Stefan Vollmer is an ethnographer and doctoral researcher at the University of Leeds, who is currently
researching the digital literacy practices of newly arrived Syrian refugees in the United Kingdom. Stefan
has a teaching background in language education and applied linguistics and has taught students of all
ages in different countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Technology for self-study – good but not good enough

Martyn Bingham

Stephen Giles

Harper Adams University

This presentation introduces the findings from a focus group on technology undertaken with Chinese
undergraduate students studying the final year of their degree at Harper Adams University (HAU) in the
UK. The focus group is drawn from in-sessional support classes for business and food science students.
The contrast between the students’ use of technology in China and their experiences post-arrival in the
UK charts a ‘technology journey’ in which Google Translate and other tech acts as both a crutch and
an inhibitor as they seek to broaden their language skills rapidly to adapt to a new and challenging
educational landscape. Martyn Bingham and Stephen Giles will describe the EAP response to this
journey – which requires acknowledging the value of such technology in self-study but also engaging
with the limitations and potential risks inherent in student dependency on a limited set of tools. By
promoting an open discussion of technology use and limitations, the HAU EAP team has been able to
establish a sense of trust and collaboration in the field of technology use, which has had the effect of
bringing the debate over such tools into the open. The presentation will introduce some of the concepts
and techniques which staff members at HAU are currently using in the language classroom – and will
highlight some proposals for further engagement.

Speaker bio:

Martyn Bingham has spent the majority of his twenty-year teaching career working in British Councils
and international schools in Asia. After returning to the UK in 2014, he started teaching EAP at Harper
Adams University where he works with both undergraduate and postgraduate international students.

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Stephen Giles has taught in a number of UK HEI settings and has also worked extensively in ESP and
as a specialist business English trainer. He leads the EAP provision at Harper Adams University, which
includes both pre-sessional and in-sessional support for students from over 30 countries.

Panel 3

Google Translate in EAP: Disruptive technology or disrupting the learning process?

Klaus Mundt

University of Nottingham

Mike Groves

University of Birmingham

Through its recent strident development, Google Translate (GT) is poised to have an increasingly
significant impact on how university students whose first language is not English produce written
coursework in English. Based on the findings of a previous study (Groves & Mundt 2015), where GT
was found to be able to produce texts that met the grammatical requirements for IELTS Band 6, we
repeated the evaluation process with the same data set in 2018 - with the result that the quality of the
texts GT produced had increased to impressive levels. Based on examples that show that GT is able
to produce quite polished English texts without much editing, we view GT as potentially ‘disruptive
technology’. In that light, we argue that the EAP teaching and learning environment is likely to undergo
changes in the foreseeable future in terms of what is taught and how it is taught. We project three
scenarios: one with a complete rejection of the technology, one with a complete embrace, and one with
a more balanced approach that views technologies like GT as learning facilitator and will necessitate a
shift towards a more multi-lingual classroom and an EAP syllabus that focusses more on inter-cultural
awareness and socio-linguistic and socio-cultural considerations of what the production of written
academic work entails.

Speaker bio:

Klaus Mundt teaches English for Academic Purposes and Translation at the University of Nottingham,
UK. His active research interests are translation pedagogy, cultural translation, language acquisition
and genre, register, discourse and corpus analysis. His recent publications engage with the concept of
untranslatability and with Google Translate in language learning and academic literacy.

Mike groves has over 20 years experience teaching English Language and English for Academic
Purposes (EAP) in places as diverse as Taiwan, Sarajevo and Barcelona. He is currently responsible
for the running of the EAP side of the Birmingham International Academy's Foundation Pathways. He
has written on EAP and Google Translate for academic and non-academic publications, and has
presented at conferences in a number of international locations.

Embracing diversity in a Higher Education EFL classroom with Google Translate

Jane Duarte

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

The fast-paced dissemination of information and the subsequent changes in literacy practices have
caused a revolutionary upheaval in today’s society in which new gadgets, online tools and apps emerge
to facilitate the communication and the way information is processed. On a smaller, yet not less
important scale, this scenario is replicated in different learning contexts - Higher Education Institutions
included. Classes have become multicultural and new challenges are brought fourth: the prerequisites
for International students’ proficiency level are not always met and as a consequence, communication
in English, used as the lingua franca for academic communication, is many times hindered. In the midst
of the effects of digital technology, multicultural diversity and miscommunication in a foreign language,

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the omnipresence of multilingual machine services as Google Translate (GT) may seem as a pivotal
aid to the construction of a borderless world. The objective of this study is to determine whether
applications such as GT are being used by students in the EFL classroom at a HEI in Portugal and what
factors determine the use or non-use of this online translation option in the learning process. Through
the use of questionnaires and practical language exercises that include GT as the main resource, our
research also aims at providing insights towards learners’ perception of GT, determining the relevance
it represents to students in decoding the meaning of words and whether learner profiles (linguistic and
cultural) also play a significant role in shaping the GT user profile.

Speaker bio:

Jane Duarte is Invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Universidade Católica
Portuguesa and researcher at CECC - the Centre of Communication and Cultural Studies. She teaches
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in undergraduate programs and the seminar on "Translation of
Economic Texts" in the MA Translation program. Her research interests include the translation of
children's literature, audiovisual translation and the use of ICT in the teaching of English as a Foreign
Language.

GT and Assessed Coursework Assignments: A Hard Taskmaster, Not a Time-Saver

Jon Wordie

ESP instructor for the Saudi Air Force

As a former career translator, this presentation would build on my impression that a major disconnect
within the UK’s EAP sector derives from an agenda that has been forged more by monolingual
educationalists than by linguists and translators. While the customers in EAP are all potential
translators, the same cannot be said for its facilitators. How many of those facilitators have ever actually
attempted to produce a quality academic text in a second language? How would they teach differently
if they had? It will be suggested that a complete ban on GT would effectively be playing King Canute.
A new concept of ‘authorship’ in the context of ESL writers at Anglophone universities in the internet
age will be offered, in what amounts to an alternative critique of a stern anti-GT presentation once
attended at the University of Birmingham. GT will be offered as part of a writing process that should
include many other internet editing tools, including parallel translation corpora and corpus-based editing
sites. The highest value of GT, it will be proposed, lies in its ability to offer an alternative first draft to be
compared with one of the student’s own authorship. A key thesis will be a belief in the ability of ESL
students to select the most desirable of alternative phrasings offered by internet tools, on the strength
of an innate receptive skill that is systematically better than their unaided productive writing skill. The
talk would include a demonstration of how I would attempt to draft a paragraph in a second language
(German) myself, by making use of GT in conjunction with other internet tools.

Speaker bio:

Jon Wordie’s degrees are in modern languages, translation studies and applied linguistics, from the
universities of Reading, Canterbury and Birmingham, respectively. Currently teaching ESP for the Saudi
Air Force, he has also taught on four pre-sessional courses for The University of Birmingham. Work
experience also includes eight years in translation and editing in Bavaria and Moscow.

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 Google Translate and plagiarism in university language formative assessment work

Junko Winch

University of Sussex

Google Translate (GT) is a free and accessible on-line translation tool to anyone including students who
study languages. However, GT has been also affecting language assessment and language teaching
education such as cheating and plagiarism. This study is focused on the coursework writings of three
students who have studied Japanese for one year with no basic understanding or knowledge of the
Japanese language. The data examined the types of academic offences students committed using GT.
The results showed that the three students who were suspected committing plagiarism show several
academic infractions in spite of teacher’s warning on plagiarism. The implications of this study are
directed at institutions, teachers and students. Institutions should review the information gap between
the website written for students and the university’s official website on plagiarism. Institutions may also
need to mention GT specifically in the plagiarism documentation. Institutions may also consider
adopting an additional coversheet system to use as student’s evidence of plagiarism. For teachers, they
also start preparing themselves for students’ evidence of plagiarism. Teachers should learn about the
institution specific regulations regarding plagiarism and impart them to the students. Furthermore,
teachers should also inform students whether they should focus on either accuracy or creativity so that
students can focus on what they need to work on in their formative or summative assessment. For
implications to students, students should be responsible of their own learning and their action which
they take (i.e. if they decided to plagiarise or not) and face the consequences of their action.

Speaker bio:

Dr Junko Winch is a Teaching Fellow in Japanese at the University of Sussex. She has obtained an MA
in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching and then undertook a Doctor of Education at the University
of Southampton. To date she has published 12 journals and 2 books.

Panel 4

Google Translate and Controlled Languages: Interactions and Impact

Hisham Ali

Translation and Training Center, Translation and Interpreting Institute

College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

Google Translate (GT) is inextricably integrated into the translation industry that continually reframes
machine translation canonicity in accordance with the ever-increasing technological advances.
Nevertheless, translation education programs tend to predominantly focus on computer-aided
translation tools, with little attention devoted to educating students about GT’s real (in)abilities and how
it might come to their aid in meaningful manners. In response to this dichotomy, this paper explores the
diverse ways in which translation students could critically and fruitfully engage with GT in the context of
controlled natural languages (CNL) and translation crowdsourcing. Through a reading of the
breakthroughs and limits of embedding GT and crowdsourcing in multiple translational contexts during
the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the paper argues for the viability of Kuhn’s PENS classification scheme
in conceptualizing CNLs-based methods for harnessing the power of GT. The conflation of both CNL
and crowdsourcing would control the linguistic mental processing of texts and push for more emphasis
on interpersonal functions, contextualization, syntactic decomposition, and consistency among crowds
of students. This would result in building the mentality and skills required for responding efficiently to
crises and large-scale projects.

Speaker bio:

Hisham Ali is currently working as a translation trainer for the Translation and Training Center at Hamad
Bin Khalifa University. He holds a B.A with honors in simultaneous interpreting, and an MA with

13
distinction in Translation Studies. His principal research interests are in translation sociology and literary
translation.

Google Translate in the Translation Classroom: a perspective from register theory

Yvonne Lee

Xiaofei Sun

University of Nottingham

Google Translate (GT) has been playing a part in students’ coursework and assignments in Higher
Education classrooms (Benda 2014, Mundt and Groves 2016). Its ability to handle different text types,
language pairs and text length has drawn increasing interests over time as it develops quickly into the
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approach (Aiken and Balan 2011, Van Rensburg, Snyman and Lotz
2012, Wu et al 2016). This paper focuses on the role of GT in a translation classroom. Through pre-
translation register analysis, students are encouraged to identify linguistic and stylistic features of
specialised medical texts drawing on concepts of register theory. This exercise closely mirrors GT’s
mechanism, aiming at identifying discourse markers and typological features in order to produce the
most appropriate translation for specific contexts. Students’ translation task is done with controlled
interaction with GT. The outcome will be compared with GT translation to reveal the syntactic
peculiarities of the ST and TT. Students are also invited to reflect upon the exercise. In so doing, the
paper wishes to raise awareness of MT’s increasing visibility in translator training, that GT can
contribute to teaching oblique translation techniques and formulaic texts. By incorporating GT to
facilitate translation, the paper also wishes to encourage trainee translators to identify the pros and
cons of GT, thereby developing the awareness of using GT as a supporting resource rather than a
primary translation tool.

Speaker bio:

Yvonne Lee is Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpreting at University of Nottingham, UK.
Since joining University of Nottingham, she has been involved in projects in user-generated translation
and translator training. She has recently published in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation
(Routledge, 2017) and co-edited Non-Professional Subtitling (Cambridge Scholars, 2017).

Xiaofei Sun holds a PhD in Translation Studies, and teaches on the MA Chinese-English Translation
and Interpreting and the MA Translation Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Google Translate in the context of culture-specific items

Edyta Źrałka

University of Silesia, Katowice Poland

Translation has long been seen as not only a linguistic but also cultural phenomenon. Bearing that in
mind, GT translations should be viewed not just as a tool to facilitate the process of translation, but from
the perspective of quality assessment connected with cultural issues. In this paper such an attitude will
be presented and advantages and drawbacks of GT translations will be analysed from the point of view
of professional translators, being appreciative of the GT aid but also aware of its possible shortcomings.
Many scholars advocate multidisciplinary approach to translation and its quality now. Juliane House
sees translation as combining linguistic constituents with a cultural context in which she incorporates
power relations among entities involved in translation (authors, translators, publishers, readers etc.)
who have a big impact on the final product of translation (House 2014). Jeremy Munday (2012) seeks
the analogies between translation and the appraisal theory (Martin, White 2005). According to Munday,
evaluation is typical of all the choices we make in communication (and translation by analogy) – of
words, syntax, etc. It is subjective in nature and matched with the values of wider social and ideological
context. In the context of such theories various questions arise. Are socio-cultural elements properly
rendered in Google translation when cultural issues are taken into consideration, how much are they

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cared about, could the GT options be trusted in that matter at all? The answers will be sought based on
the analysis of culture specific elements in some English – Polish GT translations.

Speaker bio:

Edyta Źrałka – Docor of Philosophy at Silesian University in Katowice, Poland, Faculty of Philology,
specializing in the theory of translation and interpretation, especially the idea of manipulation in
translation and specialized languages (political, legal). Sworn translator of English.

Google Translate as a Teaching Aid for the Course on Written Translation

Vera Sepeshvari

Zhiganov Kazan State Conservatoire, Kazan, Russia

Google Translate is a modern tool that translators, researchers and students use extensively over a
wide span of disciplines. Teaching a specialized translation course Written Translation in the Music
Sphere in the Russian music-training institution, GT has made an immense asset to the student’s
translation skills development. Especially concerning what translators should and shouldn’t do: deriving
from the advantages and setbacks of a GT translation. Easily accessible, this free online tool often
becomes a temptation to have one’s work “done by someone else”. By using GT for completing in-class
and take-home assignments, students learn that using machine translation of any kind doesn’t mean
only “copy and paste” but also “re-read and edit”. It makes for a good preparation for using CAT-
software. Any tool comes in handy when one knows how to use it correctly and applies it for a good
cause. Moreover, there are many features GT has to offer which are yet to be fathomed and used to
the translator’s benefit, and young professionals are eager to learn more about them.

Speaker bio:

Vera Sepeshvari, senior lecturer in the English and French languages at the Department of Foreign
Languages and Intercultural Communication, Zhiganov Kazan State Conservatoire, Kazan, Russia.
Reader of special courses on translation and interpretation for musicians. Freelance translator and
interpreter. Academic interests: similarities between music and language, teaching methodology, IT in
the ESL classroom.

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