Innovation in Language Learning

The arrival of machine translation tools and now AI such as ChatGPT, which can translate any text into almost any language, urges us to restructure our English-French translation courses. In this presentation, I will argue that not only should translation courses keep their ground in university curricula in the present situation but that they should in fact gain further importance because they can provide valuable help in the use of these new translation tools. Translation courses today are very different from what they were even ten years ago: if before the age of AI, we were teaching undergraduate students to translate accurately, now we teach them, first, to judge the accuracy of machine translation, find its shortcomings, explain them, and only then suggest their own and better version of the same translation. In fact, the use of the new tools gives us more time to focus on the grammar particularities of the target language, on its idiomatic expressions and cultural references. Thus, on a translation test students are no longer asked to simply translate a text from one language to another but to review and edit the output of a machine translation to ensure accuracy and clarity in that translation. In my presentation, I will give examples of such tasks and outline some of the main problems we face in English to French translation.  Moreover, I will argue that translation courses can play the role that language practice courses have traditionally fulfilled since the widely-used action-based approach does not always help students build a solid understanding of language structure. Thus, as we teach a generation of students who have no knowledge of traditional grammar, it is the task of our translation courses to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and language practice.