Do Mobile Translation Apps Enhance Or Hinder Translation Trainees’ Linguistic Competence: The Case Study Of Translation Students At Birzeit University

Abstract

This research tries to investigate the importance of mobile translation apps when carrying out translation activities in the classroom. Specifically, this is a semester-long study which attempts to see how beneficial it is to allow translation students enrolled in the  translation program at the Department of Languages and Translation at Birzeit University full freedom to use mobile translation apps when rendering in-class assignments from Arabic into English. To this end, two divisions of journalistic translation (334) were used as the subjects of the study, one serving as a control group and the other serving as an experimental group. Throughout the course, six assignments were given to both groups to translate from Arabic into English. The control group was given full freedom to use mobile translation apps like Google Translate, while the experimental group was not allowed to use mobile translation apps and was instead furnished with the needed glossary. The final assignment was administered to both groups under the same conditions: no mobiles were allowed and the needed glossary was supplied. Upon analysis of students’ mistakes and averages in the final exam, it has become evident that an absolute reliance on mobile translation apps such as Google Translate inside the classroom has a detrimental impact on translation students’ linguistic competence and thus their translation performance. Therefore, the researchers strongly recommend translation trainers at tertiary level to allow translation students a very limited use of mobile translation apps especially when students study English at an EFL setting like our case at Birzeit University.