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Teaching translation in the age of an ever-more awesome Google Translate - thread (I know I’m Twitter-invisible so please do share to anyone who may want to engage) /1
So I’ve recently found out I’m teaching a remote English-Arabic translation class to 3rd year students this term. The last time I taught this module was in 2013, and even back then, students had started to sneakily take out their ipads during class, or put their homework in GT /2
but for me it was instantly recognisable as a machine translation. Today, we have a double-whammy: 1, GT is becoming more amazing every day. Any 3rd year Arabic student would be proud to reach that level. 2, teaching is remote, so in class, there’s no way of telling students /3
...students to stay off the technology. So my approach, I thought, will be to acknowledge that GT exists and work with it, not against it. Some of the activities I’ve already thought of are: Critiquing GT and focusing on text types that illustrate its weaknesses, looking at /4
... different approaches to translating idioms, metaphors, culture-specific terms, humour, producing gist translations, and focusing as much on pre-translation analysis and post-translation discussion of decisions as on the actual translation. /5
