Referencing tools are often needed when language learners are doing production task, including writing and translation tasks. Most beginning and intermediate language learners cannot write a sentence without conceiving ideas in their L1 and doing mental translation (Sasaki & Hirose, 1996). In the process of language production, learners are
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often in desperate need for bilingual reference tools because they have no idea how the word is translated or what word follows the other word. Some researchers maintained that translation is a skill that most second L2 learners employ on a daily basis for a variety of purposes (Campbell, 2013; Kavaliauskienė, 2010; Mckay, 2003; Naimushin, 2002). For example, Kavaliauskienė (2010) discovered that translation is a common strategy employed by many L2 learners when doing language learning tasks and as a real-life, naturally-occurring activity that many learners engage in every day either in formal or informal circumstances. Ross (2000) also considered translation essential in social interaction since it promotes communication and understanding between people with different L1. In addition, many researchers consider translation as a fifth skill (Naimushin, 2002; Ross, 2000) or “fifth macro-skill” (Campbell, 2002). While translating, learners are actually practicing a multi-skilled activity that involves both receptive and productive language skills.
Nevertheless, in a language classroom, translation training has not yet received sufficient attention, and teachers are prone to neglect the importance of translation skills in language learning (Lin, 2011). In fact, a translation task is mostly assigned with the purpose of helping teachers to determine whether learners have learned a given expression or sentence patterns. Furthermore, it is also indicated that teachers use translation mainly for explaining complex language concepts, checking understanding and classroom management (Inbar-Lourie, 2010; Littlewood & Yu, 2011). In short, language learners rarely receive formal training in translation skills. Nevertheless, language learners still need to acquire this language skill for the propose of preparing themselves for social activity and professional practice where translation skill is needed (Campbell, 2013). Therefore, it is essential for language learners to receive more training in developing translation skills.
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To help learners promote translation skills, there is a need to provide proper training and introduce referencing tools for learners to use while translating. However, in reality, teachers have limited time in classroom for teaching translation skills or allowing students to practice translation in class. For lack of training and practice, students also tend to perform poorly in translation tasks.
To compensate for the lack translation practice in classroom setting, there is a need for introducing proper referencing tools for assisting learners in doing translation tasks.
Also, a proper bilingual referencing tool is needed when learners are self-learning translation and teachers are not always available to provide immediate feedback.
Currently, language learners usually rely on bilingual dictionaries when they do translation tasks. However, even if they are provided with bilingual dictionaries that helps them translate and looking for the expressions they need, they might produce lexical errors, with the aforementioned problems inherent in bilingual dictionaries.
With the increasing demand for translation services, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools have been developed, including spell checkers, electronic dictionaries, concordancers, and machine translation (MT) engines (Federico, Cattelan, & Trombetti, 2012). CAT tools not only benefit professional translators in terms of their productivity and accuracy, but they can also provide assistance to language learners performing translation tasks (Zanettin, 1998). Beginning language learners, due to their unfamiliarity with the target language and relatively lower language proficiency, are likely to rely on Machine Translation tools, such as Google Translate, when they are requested to translate a text into the target language. Unlike bilingual dictionaries, machine translators allow users to query a sentence instead of merely a word or a phrase.
However, the translation results provided by a machine translator is based on the correspondence of words, and these tools sometimes overlook a word’s different usage,
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which results in poor word choice, collocational and syntactic errors. Worst of all, many beginning and intermediate-level learners may not be able to discern the appropriateness of their wording, hence producing semantically and syntactically unacceptable translation outcomes.
As a matter of fact, when it comes to the field of translation, many professional translators use bilingual concordancers to produce more fluent and accurate text in the target language (Bourdaillet, Huet, Langlais, & Lapalme, 2010). Also, corpora have been extensively used in the training of translators. Therefore, researchers suggest that electronic corpora and corpus tools can be employed to train language learners to perform better on translation task (Rodríguez-Inés, 2009). Bilingual concordancers not only provides different meanings of the target word but also provides a compilation of how they are used and interact with other words in different contexts. In the process of reading and analyzing concordancing lines, learners can construct their understanding of the word meaning, learn to observe and discover word usage on their own and apply them in their writing or translation task. Although researchers have tried to stress the usefulness and effectiveness of corpus tools like concordancers, they are rarely used in actual classroom settings.
It comes as no surprise that corpus tools and concordancers are underused by language learners. Because online corpus tools are relatively new compared to online dictionaries, most language learners are not familiar with the use of corpus tools (Chan
& Liou, 2005). Kilgarriff (2009) indicated that most language teachers, especially those teaching in high schools, have never heard of concordancers, let alone using it and training their students to use it. However, most learners have learned how to use a dictionary since they started to learn a new language, and hence are more used to searching in dictionaries rather than corpus tools. Furthermore, most language learners
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find it difficult and stressful to use corpus or concordancers as reference tools because learners may be overwhelmed by the abundance of texts and may not be able to successfully locate the information they need or generate the rules by themselves (Gabel, 2001; Granger & Tribble, 1998; Yoon & Hirvela, 2004). Even if they do use concordancers, it is discovered that they use dictionaries and concordancers for different purposes (Lai & Chen, 2015). Learners usually consult a dictionary when they need information on the meaning of a word, while they use corpus tool when they need to know more about how the word is used. For most learners, their needs can be satisfied with the use of bilingual dictionaries. This may decrease their motivation in using concordancers.
Although the usefulness and effectiveness of CAT tools have been recognized, the debate about which tool is the most beneficial and proper one for language learners remains inconclusive. Furthermore, a limited number of studies have compared the effectiveness of different bilingual referencing tools and which tools can benefit lower-intermediate EFL learners the most when doing sentence-based translation task. The aim of the current research was to assess the effectiveness of two different types of bilingual referencing tools and examine whether and to what extent they can help EFL learners to perform on translation tasks.