Observing Undergraduate Students Using Translation Tools for Korean-into-English Translation
The purpose of the present study is: i) to observe and analyze how students use translation tools while they translate from Korean into English and ii) to ...
Observing Undergraduate Students Using Translation Tools for Korean-into-English Translation
The purpose of the present study is: i) to observe and analyze how students use translation tools while they translate from Korean into English and ii) to draw implications and lay the foundations for a follow-up study that explores translation pedagogy for translation tools. In other words, this study was carried out as a needs analysis for future endeavors to better teach translation tools to undergraduate students.
To achieve the first objective of the study, the researcher recruited five students as participants and asked them to translate using translation tools. They were given three Korean texts: they were each two paragraphs long, and were about the risks of TV loan advertisements, the call for better honoring war veterans, and the need for higher awareness of computer security. In order to observe how students use translation tools, screen recording was used so that participants could translate in a natural setting without any kind of control imposed. For this, the participants had to be unhindered so that they can feel as if they are doing their homework assignments in a comfortable environment, and not as if they’re participating in a certain study.
For the second objective, the researcher chose a process-oriented approach in order to gain a meaningful insight into translation education; therefore, triangulation was used, which consisted of classifying the search queries of the participants made available through screen recording and interviewing the participants. In detail, all the search queries observed were classified according to the four stages of translation process of the interpretive model. And then, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted, which was mainly designed to keep the researcher from making a subjective classification as well as to gather additional information.
The design of the research led to some significant findings. For example, data on what types of translation tools and how frequent participants use them, how they use each translation tool for each stage of the translation process and educational implications from the analysis were gained as a result of the study.
The findings of the study are deemed significant as they give further insight into what should be considered when designing a course on using translation tools. Teaching students should be done based on an in-depth understanding of what translation tools they use, how they use them in each translation process, and what could go wrong when they use them. Although the small sample size of the study made it inadequate for generalization, this study is still meaningful in that it tried to observe and gain a better understanding of how students use translation tools, giving a glimpse of what could be generalized in future studies.
Hopefully this study can be a meaningful starting point for future endeavors to realize a student-centered approach for teaching translation tools.