earticle

영어

Thanks to the innovations in the field of artificial intelligence, machine translation along with many other technologies have infiltrated numerous aspects of translators’ lives. Neither in using computer-aided translation tools nor in applying Machine Translation and Post-Editing model in the translation process, programming skills are required for translators. With more and more Artificial Intelligence technologies being open to the public via different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), by using basic programming skills translators can easily benefit from updated artificial intelligence technologies, such as machine translation, optical character recognition, automatic speech recognition, etc. This paper presents a pilot study at Beijing Language and Culture University on providing a series of programming courses to students enrolled in the Bachelor of Translation and Interpreting program. From September 2015, courses covering Computer Basics, Website Development, Database Principle, Translation Technologies, Natural Language Processing are being specifically designed and provided to over 80 students. After learning programming for 2-3 years, students are able to design and develop their own computer-aided translation tools integrated with machine translation, translation memory, terminology database and many other technologies. Cases are demonstrated in this paper to show these students’ accomplishments. In the meantime, students in this program have also studied language courses and translation courses. In this paper, development of these students’ translation competence is also explored to show that by learning programming courses students’ overall learning outcome can be improved in different aspects. Since translation learning is a lifelong journey for translators, how programming courses will influence young translators’ future career will also be discussed in this paper.