Free Online Machine Translation as a New Form of Cheating in Foreign Language Written Production

Authors

  • Ana Niño University of Manchester

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4995/eurocall.2008.16349

Keywords:

free online machine translation, online resources, plagiarism, cheating, foreign language written production

Abstract

The Internet has inevitably led to new forms of plagiarism and cheating in foreign language written production such as copying text from the Web, from an essay mill or from a free online Machine Translation (MT) system's output and passing it as one's own. This article outlines the distinction between plagiarism as cheating and plagiarism as inadvertent “borrowing” presented by McGowan (2002) and focuses on free online MT as a new form of cheating in the language class. For this purpose, some suggestions as to how to tackle it are put forward together with some recommendations which will hopefully help to raise awareness of this growing problem in the language learning community.

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References

Howard, R. (1992) A Plagiarism Pentimento. Journal of Teaching Writing, 11, pp. 233-243.

Maizey, P. (2001) Manifestations of Non-deliberate Plagiarism. Available online at http://clb.ed.qut.edu.au/events/projects/ndp/manifestations_ndp2.jsp

Nelson, P. (2002) Unintentional Plagiarism. Available online at http://clb.ed.qut.edu.au/events/projects/ndp/unintentionalplagiarism2.doc

McCarthy (2004) Does Online Machine Translation Spell the End of Take-Home Translation Assignments? CALL-EJ Online Vol. 6 No. 1, June 2004. Available online at http://www.tell.is.ritsumei.ac.jp/callejonline/journal/6-1/mccarthy.html

McGowan, U. (2002) Plagiarism or language development? An issue for international postgraduate research students. Paper presented at the Conference: Quality in Postgraduate Research: Integrating Perspectives. Adelaide, 18-19 April. Presentation available online at www.adelaide.edu.au/erga/events/2007/07_09_UMcG_ERGA_SHOULD.pdf

Pennycock (1996) Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory and Plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, pp. 201-230. https://doi.org/10.2307/3588141

Somers, Gaspari and Niño (2006) Detecting Inappropriate Use of Free Online Machine Translation by Language Students: A Special Case of Plagiarism Detection. 11th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation - Proceedings (Oslo, Norway ), pp.41-48.

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Published

11/16/2008

Issue

Section

Research papers