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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCEINTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Impacts of Globalization on Quality in HigherImpacts of Globalization on Quality in Higher EducationEducation

SEAMEO RETRAC - HoSEAMEO RETRAC - Ho Chi Minh CityChi Minh City

HOW CAN GOOGLE TRANSLATION MACHINE (GTM) ASSIST VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH?

A CASE STUDY OF TRANSLATING INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES AND SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR

IMPROVEMENT

Presenter: Dr. Nguyen Thi Chau Anh

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1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Rationale1.2. Objectives 1.3. Methodology 1.4. Significance of the study1.5. Scope of the study1.6. Overview

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a. Research questions:

How efficient and/or deficient are the target language texts produced by Google Translate Service?

What are the most common problems that characterize that translation service and how to solve them for improvement?

How does GTM assist students in learning English?

The present research is an attempt to find answers to these questions.

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b. Hypotheses of the research

One would expect major problems:Firsly, on the semantic level and in particularly on

ambiguity from polysemy; Secondly, errors on some modal verbs, particles (à,

ư, nhỉ, nhé, nha, phải không, hả, chứ?), modality makers, sentence operators in Vietnamese interrogatives.

It is expected that GTM program has been mainly designed to solve the problems in general.

But what has the practical experience actually revealed? That is the basic concern of this paper.

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A CASE STUDY OF TRANSLATING INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES

2.1 Theoretical and practical background 2.1.1 What is polysemy? The term polysemy is used in linguistics as a

means of categorizing and studying various aspects of languages. The opposite of a polysemy is a heterosemy, which means the word has only a single meaning.

Polysemy refers to a word that has two or more similar meanings

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2.1.2. How GTM translate in its service on line? Approaches and application

Bernard Vauquois' pyramid showing comparative depths of intermediary representation, interlingual machine translation at the peak, followed by transfer-based, then direct translation.

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THEORETICAL BACKGROUND These methods require extensive

lexicons with morphological, syntactic, and semantic information, and large sets of rules.

Machine translation can use a method based on dictionary entries, which means that the words will be translated as they are by a dictionary.

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2.2 Describes and explains the case study and proposes the rules and technique called “input code” for disambiguating words, which makes GTM more reliable

Dealing with interrogatives, V – E translation by Google Translation Machine (GTM) is certainly the case that has to be carefully examined and addressed for the improvement of the GTM

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Examples: modal particle for questions

Firstly, the 6 accent tones in Vietnamese were not understood by GTM and often led to ambiguity and made lexical errors. It was rather impossible for the GTM program to find equivalents to source language (SL) ambiguous items.

nha? – nhà (home) nhỉ ? - nhi (children)

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Some common words for 8x/9x in Vietnamese language and Proper nouns (which do not exist in the corpus/ dictionaries) can be used in disambiguating for the case of

polysemy Examples: Replacing these words and put them in

the parentheses ( ):1. hông, không --- ko, hok2. à, ạ --- ak3. hả, ha --- hak4. gì ---- ji5. nhỉ --- nhik6. nha --- nhak

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The length of interrogative sentences in Vietnamese in

comparison with that in English (N= 320)

Distribution of Frequency in English

130.0120.0

110.0100.0

90.080.0

70.060.0

50.040.0

30.020.0

10.00.0

Distribution of Frequency in English

Freq

uenc

y

100

80

60

40

20

0

Std. Dev = 18.88 Mean = 32.3N = 320.00

Distribution of Frequency in Vietnamese

130.0120.0

110.0100.0

90.080.0

70.060.0

50.040.0

30.020.0

10.00.0

Distribution of Frequency in Vietnamese

Freq

uenc

y

80

60

40

20

0

Std. Dev = 20.68 Mean = 36.8N = 320.00

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EXAMPLESa) Đi ăn cơm không?Google translates: Take no rice to eat?

(wrong)

a) Bạn có thể cho tôi xin ý kiến của bạn về vấn đề này (dc_ko_ak)?

Google translates:a) a) Can you give me your opinion on this

issue (dc_ko_ak)?

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Hypothesis for the case study of experiment

“If we follow the instructions for Vietnamese language input the results will be better and GTM can be improved by enhancing the quality of reliability in V- E translation”

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The first result (N=108)(the interrogative sentences from language materials and text books) with the

25.93

84.26

74.07

15.74

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

right sentences

%

wrongsentences

%

Test 1

Test 2

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The second result (N=36)(The interrogatives from students’ use)

94.44100

5.56

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Test 1

% Wrong sentences

Right sentences %

Test 2

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3. HOW CAN GOOGLE TRANSLATION MACHINE (GTM) ASSIST VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH?

Need analysis of using GTM in the perspective of making and translating interrogatives for English study

How might this learning aid can be used in social interaction systems and products so that users maximize what they learn on the Web?

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Gagne’s five categories of human performance established by learning.

Intellectual skills (“knowing how” or having procedural knowledge)

Verbal information (being able to state ideas, “knowing that”, or having declarative knowledge)

Cognitive strategies (having certain techniques of thinking, ways of analyzing problems and having approaches to solving problems)

Motor skills (executing movements in a number of organized motor acts such as playing sports or driving a car)

Attitudes (mental states that influence the choices of personal actions)

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The nine events for students’ actions and performance in class are as follows:

Giving students a task to do as home assignments individually or in group work. Students have to ask questions in different purposes beside getting information for details to get an interesting short story or an event (imaginary or true story happened somewhere else) told by one classmate in class, by watching video clips in you tube (download from 4share), or by chatting in Skype, Facebook or in Yahoo Messenger with their teachers, another classmate or an advisor; and save the data collection as lessons in Drop Box.

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1. Gaining Attention: Ss listen or read one story as an example from the teacher’s folder in the Sky drive;

2. Informing Learners of the Objective: Ss have to understand it and retell it in more details by means of media and send it to their sky drive for discussions and sharing ideas;

3. Stimulating Recall of Prior Learning: Ss prepare the questions to ask by translating Vietnamese questions to English performed by GTM and edited by students themselves;

4. Presenting the Stimulus: Ss will get the answers for their questions and high marks or small presents for asking enough correct and suitable questions as required;

5. Providing Learning Guidance: Ss will receive their teacher’s feedback as soon as they send the questions to sky drive to the teacher;

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Student assignments for using questions with GTM6. Eliciting Performance: Ss will be shown

how to make questions correctly with GTM;

7. Providing Feedback: Ss will be shown and instructed the way to make good questions for the story;

8. Assessing Performance: Ss use the answers they get to retell that story in detail with joys, and relaxations;

9. Enhancing Retention and Transfer: Ss will have some interesting stories made from their own information by asking questions.

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4. CONCLUSION

The GTM program can be described with the techiques “input code” as

Encoding the meaning of the source text; and

Re-encoding and decoding this meaning in the target language.

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The researcher’s conclusionsBased on the results of trial tests, These conclusions totally

support the hypothesis of the studyGTM still maintains some advantages. First, machine translation is much faster than

human translation. Second, machine translation has a much huger quantity of vocabulary than human and has its useful tool of how topronounce these words in each question.

Hopefully, it can be capable of translating interrogatives more reliable and translating articles according to different types effectively in the near future.

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Google believes that translating one source language to another target one in our future is crucial for everyone. We look forward to jointly working with these researchers, experts and linguists concerning GTM program and hope that we will push the frontier of social interactions research with GTM to the next level.

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TÀI LIỆU THAM KHẢO

1. http://pewinternet.org/topics/Future of the internet.aspx and http://imaginingtheinternet.org.

Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University - Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project (2010), The Future of the Internet, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

An initiative of the Pew Research Center, 2. www.ccsenet.org/ells English Language and Literature Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1;

March 2012. 3. www.ccsenet.org/ells, English Language and Literature Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1;

March 2012. 4. a. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation: From Wikipedia, the free

encyclopedia. b. http://www.google.com.vn. 5. http://www.icels-educators-for learning.ca/index.php?

option=com_content&view=article & id=54&Itemid=73 Robert Gagne, Robert Gagne’s Five Categories of Learning Outcomes and the

Nine Events of Instruction*, Description, Main Elements, Table of the 9 Events of Instruction, References

6. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-polysemy.htm

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THANK YOU FOR ATTENTION!

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THE END

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