Reflection
As you can see, this website contains so many works created by Ian in the Escort English class from 2021 to 2022. Of course, all those videos, transcripts, and practical English skills cannot be done without the help of my teacher Sherry and classmates. But in fact, there is still another tool - Google Translate (GT), that assists me unobtrusively to go through many creating processes.
In the past, I used GT only for two purposes: skimming English websites and scanning pictures. For one, as a Chinese speaker, I spend more time reading websites in English. Accordingly, when I need to get some pieces of information quickly from a long foreign article, I would translate the whole page into Chinese. GT does help me find the certain words or sentences in a short time. For the other, GT is equipped with the scanning function and can pick up the “words” in images. Thus, I don’t need to type each word on the items, for example, textbooks and newspapers, by myself.
In the beginning of this semester, there was a small GT training session for us in class. However, for me, only the strategy of “translate based on different units” works, and actually I’ve learned to employ it before. As for the other two strategies, inversed translation and phrasebook, I rarely use them. Firstly, because I don’t want to spend more time waiting until GT produces a relatively correct English sentence for me, I will revise the original translation result myself instead of trying to inverse that sentence again. Secondly, because the translations for certain sentences tend to be disposable, in other words, only used for the very video I’m working on, I won’t store the sentences in the GT phrasebook and expect to re-read them in the future. As a result, in the subtitle and Bantaoyao translation, I only used the different-unit strategy. Maybe the training about using GT for general translation, using Cambridge Dictionary for precise words, and using the search engine for professional terms can be helpful, especially for Bantaoyao translation, which includes enormous local proper nouns and takes many our efforts to search related websites.
After we finish translating, it is always followed by a process of Sherry’s and my peers’ reviews, and I think it is undoubtedly a good chance for us to learn from each other. In terms of peer discussions, because my classmates and I tend to make similar mistakes such as Chinglish（中式英文）and grammatical errors, I can practice revising that kind of words or sentences frequently and learning many new terms in other videos at the same time. What’s more, this process can lessen the teacher’s burden of picking up some awkward word choices made by us. Subsequently, with Sherry’s review as the final refinement of a transcript, I learn more about native speakers’ manner of speaking and how to use translation skills such as adding or decreasing texts.
Overall, I think GT is helpful when we practice translation in this course. Though GT might lose its reliability when processing texts in the relatively narrow domain (Bantaoyao), it does save a lot of time for us in respect to realizing articles and choosing foreign words. But again, GT provides only a general and rough translation, in the now phase it still needs human detection to make it more related to the “real world”.