ROUND-TRIP TRANSLATION AS A WRITING TOOL FOR ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Abstract

The potential of the technique known as round-trip translation to detect errors in language use has been exploited in the design of programs for automatic error detection (Hermet & Désilets, 2009; Madnani et al., 2012), but to my knowledge, no study has explored the potential of translators as a tool that learners themselves can use to correct their writing in a second language. Consequently, there is no information as to how many of the transformations introduced by round-trip translation are useful for learners, how many simply rephrase the original text, or how many actually make it worse. Hermet and Désilets (2009) report a “repair rate” of 66.4% working with prepositions in French, while Madnani et al. (2012) report 36% successful changes, 33% paraphrasing and 31% changes for the worse in 200 sentences in English. The present study found a significant improvement in the number of corrections in texts written in English by Spanish students (97%) at the cost of generating an excessive number of false positives (34%). The most reliable transformations are those affecting spelling or word morphology, which correct errors in 88.33% and 78.57% of cases, respectively. These results show the progress made in machine translation and the reliability of the round-trip translation technique for correcting errors and inform which transformations are most useful.