Thinking of using machine translation for your research paper

Category: Education

The research field has bloomed, with more papers being written by non-native English speaking academicians. Although this means more data is being collected about our world in every aspect, not as many papers get published. The reason is poor or incomprehensible English. If as a non-native academician, you do wish to publish your paper in an English journal then you do not need to be Einstein to figure out that your English should at least be intelligible. A trend of non-native English speaking authors choosing machine translation has not only increased the rejection rates of academic journals but also stretched the time required to publish a work. Most journal reviewers try their best to understand the author when they receive a fresh paper, and if they don’t, then they encourage the author to work on his English and re-write the entire matter. If the journal has a manuscript editing or translation services they rely on, then the author is even recommended to use them. No journal editor or reviewer would want any piece of information left unpublished because human beings need all the information they get to understand the world inside and outside their brains. However, most non-native speaking authors don’t grasp why they are referred to seek human translation when they have already used machine translation. The reason is simple. A native speaking reader (editor or reviewer) quickly grasps that you have used machine translation because there are several occasions when machine-translated sentences make no sense. It is easy to recognize a machine-translated paper based on the four basic errors that can’t be avoided. Your research paper has several sentence fragments. Your research paper has several long intelligible sentences. Your research paper has several illogical words or phrases. Your research paper has several sentences that don’t fit the context. Any translated paper is evaluated based on three criteria: Accuracy; Clarity; and Style. Accuracy basically involves the amount of information left unchanged in the translated document, clarity involves the ease with which a reader can read your research paper, and style involves the extent to which the translated text is appropriate to the context. A study conducted by Fiederer and O’Brien revealed that machine-translated papers fail miserably in all these three criteria. Unless your entire manuscript is built with simple sentence structures, machine-translated research papers are as good as abstract art. Machine-translated papers also have shown several punctuation errors; preferring either American or British English; or being completely insensitive to what the author has to say. Therefore, a clear and valid preference exists among journal editors and reviewers for human translation. Rather than using machine translation and then wasting your valuable time seek academic editing services or seek professional human translation services to maintain the quality of the information provided by your research paper. http://www.jostrans.org/issue11/art_fiederer_obrien.pdf