GOOGLE TRANSLATOR AS A TOOL FOR BEGGINER

TRANSLATORS
Gaspar Ramírez Cabrera Leonardo Luis Manuel Mota Morales
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de
Puebla Puebla
gasparfirst@gmail.com Lmota.contact@gmail.com
Abstract
This study aims to explore the positive benefits of using the free online service Google Translate (GT)
as a Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tool. It examines how GT can be a useful aid tool for
students studying translation, since this service contains a reliable corpus which allows to acquire the
translation of multi-noun compounds. In order to determine these positive benefits, a translation test
will be conducted. It will consist on a technical text, originally written in Spanish language, which
participants will translate in its entirety to English language with the aid of GT. They will also be
asked to do the same but only using a specialized dictionary. Then, these will be compared and
evaluated, which will allow to observe the efficiency on the translation of multi-noun compounds.
The participants of the research will be a group of English Language Teaching (ELT) students from
the language department of a public university who took elective subjects in translation. The results
of this research suggests that GT’s efficiency on translating multi-noun compounds can help students
of translation to improve the quality of their work and to expanding their set of tools in order to be
more proficient in their task.
Keywords: translation, technologies, neural machine translation, computer assisted translation,
multi-noun compounds.
Resumen
Este estudio busca explorar los efectos positivos de usar el servicio gratuito online Google Translate
(GT) como una herramienta de traducción asistida por computadora (CAT). Examina el cómo GT
puede ser útil para estudiantes de traducción, ya que este servicio contiene un corpus de confianza
que permite adquirir la traducción de sintagmas nominales. Para determinar estos beneficios, se
llevará a cabo un examen de traducción. Este consistirá en un texto técnico, originalmente escrito en
español, que será traducido por los participantes, en su totalidad al inglés con la ayuda de GT.
También se les pedirá que hagan lo mismo pero solo usando un diccionario técnico. Después, estos
serán comprados y evaluados lo que permitirá observar la eficiencia en la traducción de los
sintagmas nominales. Los participantes de esta investigación serán un grupo de estudiantes de
Enseñanza del Inglés de una universidad pública quienes tomaron materias optativas en traducción.
Los resultados de esta investigación sugieren que la eficiencia de GT en la traducción de sintagmas
nominales puede ayudar a los estudiantes a mejorar la calidad de su trabajo y a expandir su set de
herramientas para ser más proficientes en su labor.
Palabras clave: traducción, tecnología, traducción automática neuronal, traducción asistida por
computadora, sintagmas nominales.

1. Introduction way of experience and consume

The last century saw an overwhelming
development on various fields of
technology. This, in conjunction with a
series of radical changes in politics and
economics, have laid out the way to a new
information. The compression of time and
space brought by these changes have
resulted in both, a strong internationalism
and cultural clashes. Consequently, the
need of a culture of being able to
understand the information offered by
another, started to become more and more
prominent. This became particularly truth
to companies and enterprises around the
globe, since most of its operations now
relied heavily on an international market.
Thus, it is here where translation enters to
the picture.
As Olohan (2016) points out,
nowadays there is a large portion of
translation work which is technical and
scientific oriented; something which can
be credited to the interest and investment
from the various sectors of industry on
facilitating the exchange of information.
Thus, there has been an increase on the
demand for translators, which results on a
wider work field. This can be seen in the
growth of translation programs, either
majors or minors, offered by various
universities from all around the world.
However, technology never stops
to develop, and as a result, those who are
studying translation need to be constantly
on the lookout for tools that allows them to
improve their translation process.
This study aims to explore the
benefits of using the free translation
service ‘Google Translate’ (GT) as an aid
tool for the translation process.
Particularly for those who are entering to
the translation discipline, since it can
prove to be rather troublesome to have
access to expensive translation software at
early stages of studying the discipline.
It examines translations made by
students in order to determine how the
service GT can provide translations for
specific items from the source text (ST).
These translations were evaluated by
taking into account the ideas of Newmark
(1988), who claims that
Operatively, most translation is
done at the level of the smaller
units, leaving the larger units to
'work' automatically, until a
difficulty occurs and until
revision starts. (p. 67)
Thus, if the translation of specific
items, particularly those from technical texts,
are a key factor to obtain an overall better
result, then GT can prove to be an efficient
tool for the translation process,
particularly to beginner translation
students.
2. Theoretical Framework
Although the number of texts that can be
translated is truly overwhelming, and thus
the considerations that one must have to
each of these is too, there is a certain
consensus on a taxonomy which allows
translators to determine the focus points
that he or she should tackle when
translating a text.
Newmark (1988, pp. 39 - 42)
suggest that all translations can be
classified according to the function of its
ST. By following the ideas of Jakobson
(1959), Newmark proposes that there are a
three types of text: the first are those texts
with an expressive function, secondly
those with a vocative function and those
with an informative function. While the
first and the latter have a focus on the
producer and the receptor of the text,
respectively, the third one the external
situation as its focus.
Texts with an informative function
puts concrete and pragmatic situations at
its core, since they are concerned more
with knowledge rather than expressing the
mind of the writer. Thus academic papers,
scientific magazines, technical books, to
name a few, are examples of text which fit
in this category.
This research focuses on this type
of texts because as Newmark (1988) points
out
 ‘Informative’ texts constitute the
vast majority of the staff
translator’s work in international
organizations, multi-nationals,
private companies and translation
agencies. (p. 41)
Such claims coincide with Olohan
(2016) views regarding the prominence of
scientific-technical texts into the everyday
of a translator. Furthermore, it is possible
to imply that students interested in this
discipline have a higher chance of getting
a job within these fields, or at the very
least, working as free-lancers for
industries and companies.
This, however, poses two
questions: what are some of the most
important aspects that a translator should
take into account when dealing with a text
with these characteristics, and what kind of
technological resources does the translator
have in order to make the task of
translating these characteristics easier?
With regards to the characteristics
of the texts with an informative function,
Newmark (1988) points out at what he
calls “multi-noun compounds” as one of
the more prominent. Similarly, authors
like Wasak (2016) and Quiroz (2008)
depict this as a phenomenon characteristic
to the technical and scientific speech. This
research, however, will follow Quiroz’
definition of a multi-noun-compound, or
as he calls them ‘sintagma nominal
extenso especializado’: this being a
nominal phrase with three or more tokens,
which can be either definite or indefinite.
In a more wider sense, these multi-noun
compounds are formed by a nuclear noun
which can be followed in Spanish by
adjectives, prepositions other nouns, etc.;
or preceded in English by past and present
participles, adjectives, determiners, in
some cases adverbs, etc.
On example (1) it is possible to
observe a multi-noun compound with the
elements that conforms it.
(1) integrated automation machining
skills
|-X:g(np)
|-D:adj('integrated' <co-ed>
POS) integrated
|-D:n('automation' S NOM)
automation
|-D:adj('machining' POS)
machining
|-H:n('skill' P NOM)
skills
Having determined that these
elements have such relevance when
dealing with a scientific-technical text,
what follows is to identify the
technological tools that can help to
translate said multi-noun compounds.
As Hutchins (1995) points out,
despite the fact that the idea of surpassing
the difficulties posed by the barrier of
languages through some kind of automatic
device originated in the 17th century, it
was not until the 20th century that the firsts
concrete attempts were made. Machine
Translation (MT), which according to
Arnold et al. (1994) is an attempt to make
automatic translations from one human
language into another without human
input, would prove to be an interesting
idea to many researchers and government
agencies. Due to the constant political
tensions caused by the cold war, the U.S.
government started to fund many projects
realated to automated translation, with the
hopes of gaining the upper hand through
spionage. This resulted in an exponential
amount researches throughout the
country, particularly in the decades of the
50´s and 60´s. However, all of this
changed in 1966, when the Automatic
Language Processing Advisory
Committee (ALPAC) was asked by the
government sponsors to examine the
overall proficiency of MT approaches. The
ALPAC emmited a report in which it
concluded that “there is no immediate or
predictable prospect of useful machine
translation” (1966, p. 32). This was a
significant hit to MT researchers, since
most of the funding was retrieved from
them. Instead this organization suggested
that the government should redirect its
focus to machine aids for translators. MT,
nonetheless, continued to make efforts to
develop approaches well into the XXI
century.
Neural Machine Translation
(NMT) is one of the latest approaches to
MT. According to Bahdanau, Cho &
Bengio (2014), NMT is an attempt to build
and train a single and large neural network
capable of receive an input sentence a
produce a correct output. It consists of an
encoder and a decoder: the first allow read
the input sentence and creates a vector
which is then interpreted by the decoder,
whose job is to define probabilities over
the translation by breaking down the joint
probability into conditionals. In other
words, NMT first assigns a value to each
element of the input sentence, these values
are translated by following the predictions
given by the context of the vector, as well
as recurring to the corpus of the network.
The american multinational
company Google, implemented this
approach to its famous free online service
Google Translate in September 2016 (Wu,
et al., 2016). And with over 100 languages
and its easy accesibility to users (Google
Translate, 2017), this service has acquired
a prominent role on the everyday life of
people and cultures.
Yet, as a MT approach it still shares its
limitations and carries its stigmatization by
the ALPAC report, partitularly within the
academic circles. Even some of the
proponents of this approach point out at
some of its key limitations.
…this may make it difficult for
the neural network to cope with
long sentences, especially those
that are longer than the sentences
in the training corpus.
(Bahdanau, Cho, & Bengio,
2014)
Some studies on MT approaches
emphasize these constant limitations.
Authors like Aiken & Balan (2011) go as
far as to claim that that the efficiency of
GT as a MT vary greatly, thus, its
performance is never likely to reach the
same level of a professional translator.
However, instead of ditching this
service as a MT tool, there are other ways
in which it can prove to be useful. By
following the definition of Fisher (2010),
in which he depicts Computer Asisted
Translation (CAT) tools, also named as
Computer Aided Translation, as a term
used to refer to the use of computer
software as an aid in the translation
process; this research proposes to use GT
as a CAT tool instead of a MT one. Since
as Esselink (as cited in Bowker, L., &
Fisher, D., 2010) proposes, CAT tools can
help translators to tackle huge volumes of
texts to translate in shorter amounts of
time.
Due to its large neural network,
which mostly recurs to academic and
technical texts as its basis, in this research
we propose that GT can be quite effective
when translating multi-noun compounds.
3. Methodology
In order to determine the benefits of using
GT, a qualitative methodology was carried
out. It consisted on a translation test with a
ST from the manufacturing industry. Its
translations was made by participants, who
were given specific instructions, and they
were evaluated by considering specific
items from the ST.
 The ST was taken from the website
of the american company Amatrol, and it
contains information regarding a training
program which allows the users to know
how to operate a Mechatronic Mill from
said company. It is aimed to buyers from
the manufacturing industry who want to
train students that are entering to the
industry.
This text was translated by a group
of 20 students from the English Language
Teaching (ELT) major of a public
university from México, who had already
taken elective subjects in translation. Said
group was split into two, G1 and G2; and
a set of tools and instructions were given
to each of them. But while both sub-groups
shared the same parallel texts, this is, a set
of photocopies with information related to
the source context (SC) which would
allow both of them to be more familiarized
with the background of the ST; G2 was
given the link to a specialized dictionary
from Beigbeder (2006) to use it as its main
tool while G1 was instructed to use GT
instead.
These translations were evaluated
by considering the ideas of Newmark
(1988) of texts having a focus on particular
items according to its function, and those
from Quiroz (2008) who defines the
characteristics of a ‘sintagma nominal
extenso especializado’, or multi-noun
compounds, which are characteristic on
the ST of the research. First, the multi-
noun compounds used in the ST were
determined by following the definition of
Quiroz; then a translation (PT) of the ST
made by ScienTech LSP, a professional
translation agency, was used in order to
observe the translation of these multi-noun
compounds and its relation with the rest of
the sentence in which they were found.
On the example (2) we can see the
translation of a multi-noun compound.
(2) ST: In addition to integrated
automation/machining
skills…
PT: Además de las habilidades
integradas de automatización
y mecanización…
Subsequently, the multi-noun
compounds from the ST were translated
using GT in order to compare the results of
this service with those found in the PT. Out
of a total of 17 multi-noun compounds,
results provided by GT matched in 14.
Thus a list was extracted in order to have a
reference.
Similarly, the translations made by
participants were evaluated by first
determining the translations that they
made of the multi-noun compounds, then
these were compared with the ones from
the list obtained earlier in order to count
their hits and misses. Once the translations
of each participant were evaluated, the
results were written in an excel file which
allowed to elaborate graphs and observe
the overall efficiency of the translations.
4. Results
By observing the translation of the multi-
noun compounds, it was possible to also
observe the overall quality of the
participant’s work. Hence, different or
incorrect translations proved to have an
impact on the readability of the translation.
The following subsections will
discuss the more relevant aspects of the
translations made by each group.
4.1 Translations with the aid of a
specialized dictionary
G2, which made use of the specialized
dictionary, had a range from four to seven
correct translations out of the 14 multi-
noun compounds: two participants had 4,
one had 5, four had 6 and three had 7.
4.2 Translations with the aid of GT
G1, which made use of GT as a CAT tool,
had a range from seven to ten correct
translations out of the 14 multi-noun
compounds: one participant had 7, another
one had 8, three had 9 and the other four
had 10.
4.3 Limits of GT
Although, out of the original 17 multi-
noun compounds found in the ST and the
PT, GT was able to provide most of the
accurate translations, it still has its
limitations. Particularly with those multi-
noun compounds which contain a word
related to a very specific area or discipline.
For instance, here (3) are marked in
bold those words which belong to a
particular machine within the
manufacturing industry.
This study shows how GT can be used by
beginner translators as an effective CAT
tool. Since it provides accurate translations
of specific items from the ST, particularly
those from texts with a more scientific and
technical vocabulary. Although, this
certainly does not cover the entire
translation process, it is a step in the right
direction towards a quality translation.
However, it is also important to
point out that this research had its
limitations. Particularly when it comes to
observing the translations of other
characteristics from texts with an
informative function.
Yet, hopefully this research will be
useful to further research in this field.

(3) ST: The Mechatronic CNC

Mill Learning System…
PT: El Sistema de Aprendizaje
para Fresadoras CNC con
Mecatrónica…
GT: El sistema de aprendizaje
Mechatronic CNC Mill…

This point out the fact that GT’s

efficiency decreases considerably fast
when faced with a word which is strange
to its neural network. Strange words often
produce incoherent translations,
something which refers back to the
critiques by the ALPAC report.
Nevertheless, it is also important to
point out that this approach is constantly
learning, thus some of these limitations
could be overcome after some time. But of
course, others can emerge.

5. Conclusions and limitations

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