Lecture 3. Teaching Translation of Text Types with mt Error Analysis and Post-mt Editing

1. Introduction

2. Text Types

3. MT Errors and Post-MT Editing

4. Methodology

5. Findings. Students' MT error statistics

6. Using MT error analysis to identify text types

7. Learning dominant linguistic features of the three text types

8. Awareness of the relevance of text types to translation

1. Introduction

This lecture investigates whether students develop the concept of text types in translation by using machine translation (MT) errors analysis and post-MT editing. We conducted an MT-based project on twenty undergraduate students in a weekly three-hour MT class that ran for nine hours over three consecutive weeks. Students were asked to analyze lexical-specific and syntactic-level problems in the MT outputs of informative, evocative and expressive text types. After that, they were asked to think, judge and infer the distinctive linguistic features of the three text types in the process of editing the MT errors and recording their reflections. At the end of the project, students were asked to fill out the questionnaires. The result of the questionnaire shows that over half of students agree that MT errors analysis facilitates students' active mental involvement and makes them learn different lexical-pragmatic categories and syntactic structures across text types. In addition, they acquire the knowledge of the relevance of text types to translation. Finally, students agree with the effectiveness of cognitively learning the concept of text types as they try to find solutions in correcting MT errors. In conclusion, this MT-based project, though limited in the sample size, contributes to the teaching of theory through practice since it leads students from empirical practice to cognitive, conceptual acquisition of text types in translation.

Text types in translation are rarely explored as a special pedagogical subject in translation studies. This MT-based project probes the effectiveness of teaching text types in translation. More specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of teaching students the concept of text types and their relevance to translation quality and translation performance with comparative analysis of machine translation (MT) errors across text types in the process of post-MT editing.

The importance of teaching text types in translation cannot be overlooked "for the purpose of communicative translation teaching". The translator's correct notion of text types in translation is highly relevant to communicative translation, which is considered the ideal goal of translation. Colina claimed that translator trainees should know "how text types influence on the translation process" because text types have distinctive language functions, and translation of a certain text type must successfully perform the language function. However, text types have been studied per se or within the theoretical framework in linguistics and applied translation studies (Bühler, Reiss, Nord). They are neither discussed as a specific pedagogical subject nor are they used to test the cognitive learning effectiveness of a technology-assisted teaching method. In this study, we test an MT-based project of text types to check whether students can recognize distinctive linguistic features of text types with MT error analysis, and whether they can understand the significance of text types for the performance of machine translation and human editing/translation.