Teaching Machine Translation to Trainee Translators: a Survey of Their Knowledge and Opinions

This paper reports upon a survey carried out among thirty-eight trainee translators who took courses on machine translation. The survey was conducted asking the sample of students to fill out a questionnaire both at the beginning and at the end of the MT course. The questions aimed at assessing the degree of knowledge about MT of the respondents and the opinions and impressions that they accordingly had on it. The results of the questionnaire were elaborated so as to investigate the relationship between the increase in the knowledge about MT after the conclusion of the course, and the corresponding change in the students’ attitude towards the discipline, which became much less biased and in general fairly positive, thanks to a very successful and rewarding learning process. The paper suggests that the more the trainee translators became familiar with MT, realising its reasonable potential and current limitations, the less afraid they were of it. These findings encourage the increasing integration and introduction of technology into translation curricula, since the impact of computer technology on language translation directly affects professional human translators. As a result, exposing trainee translators to machine translation seems to raise the profile of their training.