Teaching MT Through Pre-editing: Three Case Studies

This article reports on three cases of teaching translation or English as a foreign language using pre-editing tasks with a machine translation system. Trainee translators or English learners were asked to input a Chinese or English paragraph into an MT system, observe the irregularities in the output, and subsequently edit the source text and input it again in the hope of getting better output from the MT system. Student reports on pre-editing procedures were collected and analysed, as well as thoughts and suggestions about using MT. It is argued that pre-editing MT input can boost student learning in the cognitive and affective domains, apart from training students to use MT systems.