Louise Ohashi

Speaker bio: Louise Ohashi is an associate professor at Gakushuin University who specializes in second language acquisition and language education. Her main research interests are learner autonomy, motivation, and the use of digital technologies for language learning and teaching. She is an avid language learner who speaks Japanese, Italian, French, and a little German. Twitter: @OhashiLou 

Abstract: DeepL, Google Translate and other machine translation tools have become commonplace, with DeepL reaching over half a billion users since its release in 2017 (Deepl, 2022) and Google Translate reaching a billion installs on Android phones alone (Pitman, 2021). While output still brings some laughable moments, highly developed machine learning technologies are producing more accurate, natural-sounding translations than ever before, particularly for commonly translated language pairs. This is a blessing in daily life, but what does it mean in language courses? Machine translation can be used to assist with reading, writing, listening and speaking, but language teachers have flagged concerns over its misuse, particularly in writing courses. In this session, we will focus on ways to use machine translation productively for writing tasks while deterring use in ways that could be considered cheating. Key goals of this session are to a) familiarize participants with strategies for producing more accurate translations (for personal use and to share with students); b) share classroom activities and homework tasks that draw on machine translation to improve writing skills; and, c) collaboratively produce a set of guidelines for students to foster productive use and deter misuse. This workshop is designed to actively engage participants through discussion and hands-on tasks, so please come to it ready to try out some of the activities on your device and share your ideas, experiences and concerns.

DeepL. (2022, May 25). Press Release: DeepL Translator welcomes Turkish and Indonesian. https://www.deepl.com/en/press-release Pitman, J. (2021, April 28). Google Translate: One billion installs, one billion stories. Official Blog: Translate. https://blog.google/products/translate/one-billion-installs/

Meeting 2pm – 5pm followed by virtual kampai.