Machine Translation as an Academic Writing Aid for Medical Practitioners

Machine Translation as an Academic Writing Aid for Medical Practitioners Carla%Parra%Escartín% carla.parra@adaptcentre.ie- Sharon%O’Brien%% sharon.obrien@dcu.ie- ADAPT-Centre,-SALIS,-Dublin-City-University,-Dublin,-Ireland- Marie-Josée%Goulet%% marie-josee.goulet@uqo.ca- University-of-Quebec-in-Outaouais,-Gatineau,-Canada- Michel%Simard%% Michel.Simard@cnrc-nrc.gc.ca- -National-Research-Council-of-Canada- - Abstract In this paper we explore the utility of Machine Translation as a writing aid and its impact on the quality of the text produced. We focus on medical practitioners who are native speakers of Spanish and who need to publish their scientific work in English as a foreign language. After carrying out a general survey to determine whether Spanish-speaking medical practi- tioners already use MT as a writing aid, we engaged five participants in an experiment where we asked them to write a paper in Spanish that was subsequently machine translated. They were then asked to post-edit the MT output. We analyse their post-edits and further attempt to evaluate the overall quality of their texts by engaging a professional proofreader. Our re- sults suggest that the texts produced with the help of MT+post-editing still require many edits in order to be considered of acceptable quality. In the conclusion, we identify several avenues worthy of future investigation and that could help achieve better quality. 1. Introduction In recent times two developments have led to a new type of Machine Translation (MT) deploy- ment, i.e. MT for personal use. Those two developments are: (1) freely available online MT systems and (2) increasing quality of MT output, for some language pairs at least. The ‘average’ internet user can now take advantage of MT to assist with various tasks such as school home- work, translating website content for service and product reviews, and so on. Embedding of MT widgets in all sorts of websites has also contributed to personal MT usage. One user type that might avail of MT for personal, and professional, purposes is the academic whose first language is not English, but who, in order to widely disseminate his or her work, wishes to publish in English. It is our belief that some who write in English as a Foreign Language (henceforth: EFL writers) are using freely available online MT systems as an aid to the writing process, first writing passages of text in their L1 (or first language) and translating those into English as they produce academic articles. Despite increasing quality from MT engines, it is still accepted that MT output generally requires post-editing before it is of publishable quality. The focus of our research is on the use of MT as an aid by EFL writers in specialised fields. As this topic appears to have not been researched in any detail, as outlined below, we aim to explore the utility of MT as a writing aid and its impact on the quality of the text produced. Proceedings of MT Summit XVI, vol.1: Research Track Nagoya, Sep. 18-22, 2017 | p. 254 English is the undisputed lingua franca of academia (Bennett, 2013, 2014, 2015). This forces those who are not native speakers of English to publish in English in order to disseminate their research and progress their careers. …

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