REFLECTION OF USING GT
I have learned a lot from using Google Translate for doing several translation tasks in this course. Since I was in junior high school, I have used GT for my English learning of translating vocabularies and the whole sentence from English to Chinese. However, I rarely use GT to translate from Chinese to English like what we have done in this course. At first, I think there will be a lot of mistakes to do the 2 video subtitle translation tasks, and the Bantaoyao transcript translation task by GT. Thus, I simply translate based on different units: words, phrases, and short texts. It is quite useful beacause it is usual that I will forget some words. Then, due to peers’ experience, I try to translate based on paragraphs, or the entire text and then to compare the result of GT and my own idea on the translation text. Based on the translation generated by Google Translate, I not only try to refine my translation by my own, but also have peer discussions and get teacher feedback,which is really helpful when I refine the GT output.
Based on the three tasks I did in the course, I observe some machine-generated errors in it. First, it is quite often that GT can not understand the place name and translate in a weird version, for example: it translate北港 as northern Hong Kong, 三峽 as three gorges. Second, the sequence of word in the sentence is hard to understand in English. GT translate it directly, but it’s not the usual way for people to convey a concept by English.
Indeed, GT helps a lot in translation in this course. On the one hand, it assists me a lot in vocabulary and sometimes give me an idea of changing the use of vocabulary. On the other hand, it is least helpful for me to translate the name of a place or a complicated sentences. Using Google Translate for the subtitle translation and Bantaoyao transcript translation practice is a good idea for us, students, to begin learning the translation. However, I won’t and I suggest that we shouldn’t rely too much on GT. Maybe we can do it in editting way, which is that we can translate by ourselves in the first time, let GT translate the whole paragraphs as second step and we compare two texts and revise as the last step.
