Pixel International Conferences

It is hard to deny the significance of the role machine translation has taken in the routine of businesses, translation specialists and even young language learners today. Studies show that the use of machine translation by translation students leads to a number of benefits, including enhanced understanding of language, higher speed of translation and even increased creativity. To go further, as this paper will demonstrate through the inclusion of a survey among university students of Machine Translation in the University of Kyoto, Japan, the computational or mathematical aspect has so much as seemingly been “pushing away” the language-related side of computational linguistics as an academic field. The reason behind such a trend can be traced to a more general association of language and mathematics, accounted for in Tanaka-Ishii’s elaborate study, “Statistical Universals of Language: Mathematical Chance vs Human Choice” (2021). Is the study of language(s) becoming obsolete? On the contrary, an adequate reaction on the side of humanities studies would be an adaptation of curricula that accounts for the role of technological and research advancements in the field of translation and language studies. In fact, language could fit more than neatly in the historically highly mathematical curriculum of Computer Science. This paper will evaluate this necessity as well as provide specific guidelines as to novel modalities through which language studies can be incorporated in a middle and high school curriculum (for instance, “meaning making”, “pre- and post-editing”, and “beneficial and ethical use of machine translation in the language classroom”).