Post-Editing as the Means to Activate Students’ Thinking and Analytical Process: Psycholinguistic Aspects

Abstract

The aim of the research is looking for the ways to intensify the future translators’ analytical and thinking activity during their independent work in online teaching. The author strives to achieve it through the combination of post-editing machine-translated texts and the Think-aloud protocol procedure. It is also assumed that this combination reduces the students’ dependence on the MT target text structure, as well as improves their competence in translating specialized texts. The methodology of research involved experimental post-editing-based online teaching (28 contact hours and 92 hours of independent work) of an elective university course ‘Specifics of translating English-language discourse in the domain of Psychology’ to the first-year MA students (majoring in English and Translation) whose command of English ranged from C1 to C2 levels in the CEFR classification. The parameters of analysis included the percentage of the students’ uploaded home tasks, the degree of the subjects’ post-editing intensity in their weekly homework, the students’ independence in the interim and final tests, as well as the marks in the Final test. The results of the analysis demonstrated a substantial difference between various groups of the subjects by all indicators. The amount of home tasks uploaded by the subjects in groups A and B (with more intensive analytical and thinking activity) exceeds the similar parameter in groups C and D (with less intensive activity) more than twofold. There is a considerable advantage of the groups A and B (and even C) subjects’ post-editing intensity in their weekly homework as compared to group D. The intensity of the students’ analytical and thinking activity decreased from the highest (group A) to moderately high (group B) to average (group C) and to low (group D). The degree of the students’ independence in the interim and final tests decreased from 85.0% (group A) to 35.0% in group D, with the remaining groups’ indicators in between – 59.0% (group B) and 46.0% (group C). These indicators clearly correlate with the average marks in the final test, which amounted to 93.80, 63 and 53 points (out of 100) in groups А, В, C and D respectively. Conclusions. Post-editing, in combination with the modified TAP procedure, contributes to the efficient development of the specialized texts translation competence due to the intensification of the students’ analytical and thinking activity, reduces their dependence on the MT target text structure and correlates with the improvement of the overall quality of their translation.