Chinese speakers’ use of machine translation as an aid for scholarly writing in English: a review of the literature and a report on a pilot workshop on machine translation literacy

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of free online machine translation tools, and particularly following the integration of artificial neural networks into this technology, there has been a growing interest in exploring the potential of machine translation as an aid for writing in another language. This article synthesizes the literature that focuses specifically on the use of machine translation by Chinese speakers who seek to write in English in a scholarly context. This article also reports on a pilot study carried out with international students from China at a Canadian university. The students participated in a machine translation literacy workshop where they learned tips to use this technology more effectively to help them with writing in English. Overall, the workshop was a success with students reporting increased knowledge about and confidence in using machine translation; however, they also suggested that future iterations of the workshop could be improved by adding more language-pair specific tips for translation-friendly writing, as well as more information on post-editing the Chinese-English language pair.

KEYWORDS:

• Scholarly communication
• scholarly publishing
• English as an additional language
• machine translation
• machine translation literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported in part by a grant from Concordia University Library as part of its 2019 Researcher-in-Residence program, and by an Insight Grant (435-2020-0089) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Lynne Bowker

Lynne Bowker , PhD, is Full Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa in Canada, where she teaches and conducts research in the areas of translation technologies and language for special purposes. She is the author of Computer-Aided Translation Technology (2002, University of Ottawa Press), and co-author of Working with Specialized Language: A Practical Guide to Using Corpora (2002, Routledge) and Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community (2019, Emerald).