Machine Translation Tools in Teaching Foreign Languages

   One of the urgent problems of teaching foreign languages in higher education is the use of modern electronic means in teaching. Specialized programs and websites allow machine translation, the quality of which increases with the development of technical capabilities.

   The purpose of the study is to determine the place of machine translation tools in the process of teaching foreign languages.

   The object is the use of machine translation tools in the academic environment, the subject is the determination of the mechanisms of using machine translation tools in the educational process concerning foreign languages.

   Based on this, the authors defined the objectives of the study: to conduct a comparative analysis of works devoted to the quality of machine translation and the attitude of teachers and students to machine translation tools; to consider the feasibility of including the appropriate module in the programs of disciplines related to the teaching of foreign languages.

   The authors used the analysis of recent works on the specifics of the use of machine translation in the educational process. The authors' experience in this field was also summarized. The paper shows that specialists in the field of foreign language professional communication face such problems as conservatism, polysemy, lack of equivalence in their activities. One of the means of overcoming these problems is machine translation and its component part – online translation. However, despite the significant improvement in its quality in recent years, it still does not meet the tasks of translating professional and specialized texts and requires at least post-editing. In this regard, the task of creating specialized websites and applications for technical terms and texts is acute. The authors propose to evaluate the existing translation systems according to a number of criteria, including the equivalence of the translation, the number of necessary corrections, and the correspondence of the style of the original. The authors, based on their own experience, identify online translation systems that best meet these criteria. Recommendations for teaching undergraduates and postgraduates to post-edit texts obtained as a result of machine translation are offered. The conclusions suggest more active use of machine and online translation in the educational process at universities. This can be achieved by including the appropriate section in the work programs of disciplines related to the teaching of foreign languages.

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