When, why and how students use machine translationĭuring the first phase of my NRO Comenius Senior Fellow project “The Value of Machine Translation in the Multilingual Academic Community” we launched a survey among students in Humanities at Leiden University to determine the current state of play. Is it allowed for homework and writing an e-mail to your instructor but fraud or plagiarism in an exam or thesis? Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash But there is currently no formal instruction on how to use machine translation technology for educational and academic purposes, and most Course and Examination Regulations (Dutch: OER) do not specify when the use of such technology is allowed and when it isn’t. And Leiden University is committed to the idea that the increasing technologization and globalization of Dutch Higher Education cause a need for new transferable digital skills. Leiden University is deeply concerned with data management and privacy, yet our staff and students use free, online machine translation apps all the time to translate all kinds of sensitive information.

Do they understand how machine translation works, what it does and doesn’t do, when it can be used and when it shouldn't be? Do they know what the most common errors it makes are and when it is considered unethical to use it? But we don’t know when and why and how they use it. It is used not only by professional translators and language professionals, but in a wide range of contexts, both formal and informal.Īnd of course our students use it. Machine Translation, the process by which a computer or mobile phone application such as Google Translate, DeepL, Yandex or Papago automatically translates a text from one language into another without any human involvement, has become a part of everyday life. “Even.” It’s true though – it’s easy and only takes a second. And the easiest, which is particularly telling in the Dutch expression Ik heb het even door Google Translate gehaald.

People say it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world to do. I’m sure most of you have heard someone say this recently. Oh, you know, I just Google Translated it.

Google translate to japanese english