Assessing Awareness and Acceptability of Neural Machine Translation among Japanese University Students in Relation to Its Practical Application

Abstract

With the advancing accuracy and reliability of machine translation, it is increasingly considered beneficial for English users and learners to have knowledge of and experience with machine translation as a practical aid of communication beyond language barriers. Focusing on Japanese-English translation, this study provided Japanese university students with opportunities to use machine translation for their own essays and for passages of their preference taken from the Web, and to explore rules in relation to Japanese pre-editing to increase the accuracy of machine translation. According to observation of their actual performance in a classroom and results of a questionnaire, their interest in machine translation proved to be unexpectedly high, and the rules they found had much in common with those revealed in previous studies. Another focus of this study concerned the pedagogical issue of whether to approve the introduction of machine translation into English education. Concerning the practical (jitsuyo) and cultural (kyoyo) aspects of English education, this study recommends that more emphasis be placed on the kyoyo aspect than has been the case, as machine translation will likely play an increasingly extensive and substantial role in terms of its jitsuyo aspect but the kyoyo aspect is critical for developing appropriate skills in logical thinking as applied to language learning