'No more rage against the machine': Developing students' "Machine Translation Literacy"
Résumé
Many students today use online machine translation (MT) tools, from a very young age to advanced students enrolled in university translation programmes. Studies have shown that such tools are used not only for translation tasks but also for language acquisition in general. Teachers and trainers then have 2 options: (i) see only the bad aspects of such tools, by keeping them outside the classroom, forbidding students to use them, and penalizing them if they do, or (ii) develop students' "machine translation literacy" (see Bowker & Ciro 2019) for a principled approach (Loock 2019), that is teach the strengths and limits of MT.
In our presentation, we will defend the second approach and discuss the use of MT tools by both undergraduate students in languages and master's students in translation. If teaching MT and post-editing is no issue in a master's translation programme, as such skills are often necessary to join today's translation market, the use of MT tools in language classes with undergraduate students is still controversial. However, we will report on a study that shows that such students do massively use MT but fail to correct MT errors, hence the need to help them develop their MT literacy.