I PARTICIPATE, THEREFORE I AM: A STUDY ON STUDENTS’ EFFORTS OF HELPING GOOGLE TRANSLATE TO REFINE ITS TRANSLATION RESULTS

Abstract

This study invited a group of Taiwanese English-as-a-foreign- language (EFL) tertiary-level students to help Google Translate (GT) Community to refine its translation output. The participants engaged in 5 types of translation refinement tasks by responding to the input provided by GT Community (the first four tasks) or entering translation suggestions when encountering inappropriate translation generated by GT (the fifth task). The results indicated that the participants were able to generate highly accurate output for the first four tasks. With regard to the fifth task, many students entered proverbs, idioms, cultural expressions or slang for GT to translate and deemed GT’s inability to translate beyond literal meaning as something to be improved upon. There were also nearly 25% of over-correction due to students’ excessive scrutiny.All in all, students generally enjoyed the experience of helping GT to improve its translation quality. As students took the role of active contributors of knowledge, they developed competence and gained experience of participating in the digital world. Their participation also helped them to refine their language knowledge and developed their research abilities. The current study ends with a few possible directions for future research. Keywords: Google Translate (GT), Google Translate Community, translation refinement tasks, online participation