Exploring undergraduate translation students’ perceptions towards machine translation: A qualitative questionnaire survey

Machine translation (MT) has relatively recently been introduced in higher education institutions, with specialised courses provided for students. However, such courses are often offered at the postgraduate level or towards the last year of an undergraduate programme (e.g., Arenas & Moorkens, 2019; Doherty et al., 2012). Most previous studies have focussed on postgraduate students or undergraduate students in the last year of their programme and surveyed their perceptions or attitudes towards MT with quantitative questionnaires (e.g., Liu et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2021), yet undergraduate students earlier in their translation education remain overlooked. As such, not much is known about how they perceive and use MT and what their training needs may be. This study investigates the perceptions towards MT of undergraduate students at the early stage of translator training via qualitative questionnaires. Year-two translation students with little or no MT knowledge and no real-life translation experience (n=20) were asked to fill out a questionnaire with open-ended questions. Their answers were manually analysed by the researcher using NVivo to identify themes and arguments. It was revealed that even without proper training, the participants recognised MT’s potential advantages and disadvantages to a certain degree. MT is more often engaged as an instrument to learn language and translation rather than straightforwardly a translation tool. None of the students reported post-editing machine-generated translation in their translation assignments. Instead, they referenced MT output to understand terms, slang, fixed combinations and complicated sentences and to produce accurate, authentic and diversified phrases and sentences. They held a positive attitude towards MT quality and agreed that MT increased their translation quality, and they felt more confident with the tasks. While they were willing to experiment with MT as a translation tool and perform post-editing in future tasks, they were doubtful that MT could be introduced in the classroom at their current stage of translation learning. They feared that MT would impact their independent and critical thinking. Students did not mention any potential negative impacts of MT on the development of their language proficiency or translation competency. It is hoped that the findings will make an evidence-based contribution to the design of MT curricula and teaching pedagogies. Keywords: machine translation, post-editing, translator training, perception, attitudes, teaching pedagogy References: Arenas, A. G. , & Moorkens, J. (2019). Machine translation and post-editing training as part of a master’s programme. Journal of Specialised Translation, 31, 217–238. Doherty, S. , Kenny, D. , & Way, A. (2012). Taking statistical machine translation to the student translator. Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Commercial MT User Program. Liu, K. , Kwok, H. L. , Liu, J., & Cheung, A. K. (2022). Sustainability and influence of machine translation: Perceptions and attitudes of translation instructors and learners in Hong Kong. Sustainability, 14(11), 6399. Yang, Y. , Wang, X. , & Yuan, Q. (2021). Measuring the usability of machine translation in the classroom context. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 16(1), 101–123.