Machine Translation Impact on Language Learning

Objective

The MTrill is a process-oriented research that aims at investigating how online freely available Machine Translation (MT) systems are impacting the acquisition and processing of English as a second language. The research will shed light on issues involving a central aspect of language acquisition: the so-called language binding, i.e. the ability to combine single words properly in a grammatical sentence in a second language. To pursue this goal, a syntactic priming experiment will be carried out in which participants will be tested as whether they produce the same syntactic structures that had been previously seen during a translation task using a MT. The project brings a brand-new methodological approach within MT process-oriented evaluation research and it goes beyond the existing state-of-the-art approaches since it will focus on translation processing complemented by product analysis (oral production). The project will be conducted under the supervision of Professor Andy Way and Doctor Monica Ward in the ADAPT Centre based in Dublin City university. A four-months secondment will be carried out in the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in the Neurobiology of Language research group under the supervision of Professor Peter Hagoort. The knowledge acquired during the secondment will be consolidated in the return phase through implementation of the experiments carried out for this project as well as through teaching and co-supervision activities. Results of this research will be disseminated through conferences and journal paper publications and will be communicated to multiple audiences through articles published in non-academic magazines, blogs and social media. The fellowship will attract academic networking opportunities, skill-set improvements and a personal and professional transformative experience to the researcher since it will establish her as the new leading light in research of an interdisciplinary field.