Join us for an exciting webinar, ‘A Ghostwriter in the Machine,’ led by Klaus Mundt and Mike Groves, discussing the recent years of Machine Translation (MT) and its emergence as a useful writing tool for students and academics whose first language is not English. However, there are limitations and implications that come with the use of this technology, especially in terms of academic integrity and assessment. This talk will summarise years of research into online MT tools and present findings of the views of academic staff on student use of MT. Join the webinar on Friday 12th May 10:30am-11:30am, and view the abstract below:
“Machine Translation (MT) quality has been developing dramatically in recent years (Lee, 2021), and there is an emerging recognition of MT as useful writing tool (Luo & Hyland, 2019) for students and academics whose first language is not English. In line with this. Bowker and Ciro (2019) have recently introduced the notion of MT Literacy as part of Digital Literacies in the academic context. Hence, this freely available and fairly sophisticated technology requires consideration in Higher Education (HE), where students who are studying in a second language are likely to utilise it as facilitating tool for their academic work. While the technology has visible strengths, it also comes with a number of limitations in terms of what and how it translates; and it raises questions regarding ownership of the work the student may produce with the help of this technology. This also has implications in the area of academic integrity and assessment. This talk will summarise several years of research into the abilities of online MT tools and present findings of the views of academic staff on student use of MT, for instance to produce academic writing for assessment. It will further situate MT in the Digital Literacies. It is hoped that this will enhance understanding of the technology, and feed into the discussion of how it could be treated in HE.”
Register for the event
BU staff can join directly via the link on the Workshops and Drop-ins page
Klaus Mundt & Mike Groves
Mike Groves has taught EAP for 15 years, in the UK and Asia. He specialises in pre-undergraduate preparation for students whose first language is not English. His interests include academic literacies, student transition and online translation, about which he has published and spoken at a number of international conferences. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
Klaus Mundt teaches English for Academic Purposes and Translation. His research interests are translation pedagogy, cultural translation, machine translation, language acquisition and genre, register, discourse and corpus analysis. He is the deputy head of the Centre for English Language Education at the University of Nottingham.
References:
Bowker, L., & Ciro, J. B. (2019). Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Emerald Publishing.
Lee, S.-M. (2021). The effectiveness of machine translation in foreign language education: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 0(0), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2021.1901745
Luo, N., & Hyland, K. (2019). “I won’t publish in Chinese now”: Publishing, translation and the non-English speaking academic. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 39, 37–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.03.003
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Previous webinars
A reminder that BU colleagues can catch up on previous webinars in the Academic Integrity speaker series on FLIEFlix, where you will find recordings and accompanying slides for all the speakers.
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