Translation Exercise Assistant: Automated Generation of Translation Exercises for Native-Arabic Speakers Learning English

Machine translation has clearly entered into the marketplace as a helpful technology. Commercial applications are used on the internet for automatic translation of web pages and news articles. In the business environment, companies offer software that performs automatic translations of web sites for localization purposes, and translations of business documents (e.g., memo and e-mails). With regard to education, research using machine translation for language learning tools has been of interest since the early 1990’s (Anderson, 1993, Richmond, 1994, and Yasuda, 2004), though little has been developed. Very recently, Microsoft introduced a product called Writing Wizard that uses machine translation to assist with business writing for native Chinese speakers. To our knowledge, this is currently the only deployed education-based tool that uses machine translation. Currently, all writing-based English language learning (ELL) writing-based products and services at Educational Testing Service rely on e-rater automated essay scoring and the Critique writing analysis tool capabilities (Burstein, Chodorow, and Leacock, 2004). In trying to build on a portfolio of innovative products and services, we have explored using machine translation toward the development of new ELL-based capabilities. We have developed a prototype system for automatically generating translation exercises in Arabic --the Translation Exercise Assistant. Translation exercises are one kind of task that teachers can offer to give students practice with specific grammatical structures in English. Our hypothesis is that teachers could use such a tool to help them create exercises for the classroom, homework, or quizzes. The idea behind our prototype is a capability that can be used either by classroom teachers to help them generate sentence-based translation exercises from an infinite number of Arabic language texts of their choice. The capability might be integrated into a larger English language learning application. In this latter application, these translation exercises could be created by classroom teachers for the class or for individuals who may need extra help with particular grammatical structures in English. Another potential use of this system that has been discussed is to use it in ESL classrooms in the United States, to allow teachers to offer exercises in students’ native language, especially for students who are competent in their own language, but only beginners in English. We had two primary goals in mind in developing our prototype. First, we wanted to evaluate how well the machine translation capability itself would work with this application. In other words, how useful were the system outputs that are based on the machine translations? We also wanted to know to what extent this kind of tool facilitated the task of creating translation exercise items. So, how much time is involved for a teacher to manually create these kinds of items versus using the exercise assistant tool to create them? Manually creating such an item involves searching through numerous reference sources (e.g., paper or webbased version of newspapers), finding sentences with the relevant grammatical structure in the source language (Arabic), and then manually producing an English translation that can be used as an answer key. To evaluate these aspects, we implemented a graphical user interface that offered our two users the ability to create sets of translation