Assessing Scientific Translation Proficiency in Higher Education Through the Use of Google Translation: Evidence for Developing a Chinese Scientific Translation Curriculum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1603.05Keywords:
machine translation, translation quality, translation assessment, scientific translation, Chinese languageAbstract
This study aims to examine and compare the abilities of university students from diverse academic backgrounds—Chinese, Science, Social Science, and Health Science—in translating scientific and technological content from Chinese to Thai. The objective is to assess how disciplinary knowledge influences translation performance in the context of Thailand’s increasing economic and educational ties with China. A comparative analysis was conducted using translation tasks assigned to students enrolled in programs related to Chinese, Science, Social Science, and Health Science. Participants were assessed based on criteria such as language proficiency, scientific accuracy, and organizational clarity. The performance of each group was evaluated to identify strengths and gaps related to their respective academic training. The findings revealed that students from Science and Social Science programs outperformed others in Chinese-to-Thai translation tasks. Science students excelled in scientific accuracy and terminology, while Social Science students demonstrated better fluency and structure in written translations. In contrast, students from the Chinese language program showed lower performance in translating scientific content, highlighting a lack of scientific foundation that affected their comprehension and coherence. The study suggests that disciplinary background has a significant impact on translation abilities in science and technology contexts.
References
Boldyrev, N. N., & Dubrovskaya, O. G. (2016). Sociocultural commitment of cognitive linguistics via dimensions of context. Ilha Do Desterro: A Journal of English Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 69(1), 173–190. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n1p173
Cane, E. (2015). Towards a language-oriented approach to human cognition. Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4(2), 176–182. https://doi.org/10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2s2p176
Charamba, E. (2023). Translanguaging as bona fide practice in a multilingual South African science classroom. International Review of Education, 69(1–2), 31–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-023-09990-0
Choi, J.-Y., Kushner, K. E., Mill, J., & Lai, D. W. L. (2012). Understanding the language, the culture, and the experience: Translation in cross-cultural research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 11(5), 652–665. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691201100508
Ding, P. (2021). A corpus-based study of conceptual metaphor: On Chinese English learners’ use of “wind.” Open Journal of Social Sciences, 9(10), 448–456. https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2021.910031
Fang, X. (2014). Conceptual metaphor and vocabulary teaching in the EFL context. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 4(2), 375–381. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2014.42030
Giampieri, P. (2020). Data-driven learning in English for academic purposes class. Language Learning in Higher Education, 10(1), 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2020-2006
Gutiérrez, L. P. (2020). Inverse translation and the language student: A case study. Language Learning in Higher Education, 10(1), 171–186. https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2020-2013
Halimah, A. M. (2015). Teaching translation of poetry: A collaborative approach. English Language and Literature Studies, 5(1), 26–32. https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v5n1p26
Hong-ping, C. (2020). Strategies on Chinese-English translation of abstracts of medical papers. DEStech Transactions on Social Science, Education and Human Science. https://doi.org/10.12783/dtssehs/ssme2019/34814
Horst, D. (2020). Patterns ‘we’ think by? Critical cognitive linguistics between language system and language use. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 8(1), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2020-0005
Huang, W., & Agbanyo, G. K. (2022). Multicultural neurolinguistics: A neuroscientific perspective of cross-cultural differences in translation. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 939517. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.939517
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2013). The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture. Intercultural Pragmatics, 10(2), 233–255. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2013-0014
Juarez, M. T., & Kenet, C. M. (2018). Translating research as an approach to enhance science engagement. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(8), Article 1749. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15081749
Kirby, S. (2013). Language, culture, and computation: An adaptive systems approach to biolinguistics. In C. Boeckx & K. K. Grohmann (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (pp. 460–477). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kleidermacher, H. C., & Zou, J. (2025). Science across languages: Assessing LLM multilingual translation of scientific papers. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.17882
Kocakülah, M. S., Üstünlüoğlu, E., & Kocakülah, A. (2005). The effect of teaching in native and foreign language on students’ conceptual understanding in science courses. Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, 6(2). Retrieved from https://www.ied.edu.hk/apfslt/download/v6_issue2_files/kocakulah.pdf
Löffler, D., Paier, W., Toriizuka, T., Ikeda, M., & Hurtienne, J. (2015). Augmented happiness: Simple color changes influence users’ conceptual choices. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 9167, pp. 248–256). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22723-8_20
López Navarro, I., Moreno Fernández, A. I., & Rey-Rocha, J. (2017). Dificultades de los investigadores españoles para publicar en revistas internacionales: métricas, editores y multilingüismo. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 14(1), 13–33. https://doi.org/10.5209/TEKN.54142
Lyons, S. (2016). Quality of Thai to English machine translation. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 9827, pp. 261–270). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42706-5_20
Madkour, M. (2018). The impact of culture and intercultural competence on the performance of students in translation. RAIS Conference Proceedings – The 11th International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3303360
Massey, G., & Ehrensberger-Dow, M. (2017). Translating conceptual metaphor: The processes of managing interlingual asymmetry. Research in Language, 15(2), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1515/rela-2017-0011
McGee, P. (2019). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Training Language and Culture, 3(1), 73–84. https://doi.org/10.29366/2019tlc.3.1.5Naveen, P., & Trojovský, P. (2024). Overview and challenges of machine translation for contextually appropriate translations. iScience, 27(10), Article 110878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110878
Nguyen, T. M., & Dao, T. X. P. (2020). Learners’ difficulties in self-evaluation in English–Vietnamese translation quality assessment. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 3(10), 156–163. https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2020.3.10.18
Pelkey, J. (2023). Embodiment and language [Review of the book Embodiment and language]. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 14(5), e1649. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1649
Plyth, P. S. (2020). Translation affects literary and cultural systems: How to observe the features of translation? Applied Translation, 14(1), Article 1141. https://doi.org/10.51708/apptrans.v14n1.1141
Popel, M., Macháček, D., Auersperger, M., Bojar, O., & Pecina, P. (2019). English-Czech systems in WMT19: Document-level Transformer. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1) (pp. 342–348). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-5337
Rahmaniah, R., & Anggriani, R. (2018). Analysis of students’ problems in translating English into Indonesian proverbs at XI grade at SMA Muhammadiyah Mataram in academic year 2014–2015. Paedagoria: Jurnal Kajian Penelitian dan Pengembangan Kependidikan, 7(2), 26–36. https://doi.org/10.31764/paedagoria.v7i2.27
Ramírez-Castañeda, V. (2020). Disadvantages of writing, reading, publishing and presenting scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian PhD in biological sciences. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.15.949982
Shen, G., Feng, T., & Cheng, Y. (2022). Optimization of English learning mode under the influence of artificial intelligence translation. Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, 2022, Article 7755297. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7755297
Sirinit, T. (2018). Análisis de los errores de traducción de los alumnos tailandeses en la traducción del texto con elementos culturales (español–tailandés). FITISPos-International Journal, 5(1), 170–180. https://doi.org/10.37536/fitispos-ij.2018.5.1.170
Steigerwald, E., Ramírez-Castañeda, V., Brandt, D. Y. C., Báldí, A., Shapiro, J. T., Bowker, L., & Tarvin, R. D. (2022). Overcoming language barriers in academia: Machine translation tools and a vision for a multilingual future. BioScience, 72(10), 988–1002. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac062
Sun, Y. (2022). Literary translation and communication. Frontiers in Communication, 7, Article 107377. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.1073773
Tairova, F. F. (2021). Cognitive principles of information coverage in literary texts in English and Uzbek. International Journal of Social Science and Human Research, 4(10), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.47191/ijsshr/v4-i10-44
Van Dalen, B. (2011). Between Orient and Occident: Transformation of knowledge. Annals of Science, 68(4), 445–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2011.617946
Webb, P. (2010). Science education and literacy: Imperatives for the developed and developing world. Science, 328(5977), 448. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1182596
Yonezawa, A. (2012). Japan’s university education in social sciences and humanities under globalization. In A. López-Varela (Ed.), Business, social sciences and cultural studies: Issues of language, public opinion, education and welfare (pp. 397–410). InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/38850
Zhao, Y., & Wang, Q. (2025). Improvement of English–Chinese bilingual learning by integrating semantic analysis and neural machine translation. Scientific Reports, 15, Article 27319. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-12614-2
Zhou, H., & Luo, X. (2024). Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics: Integrating Marxist perspectives on contemporary Cognitive Linguistics theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1475196. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1475196
Zuberbühler, K. (2013). The cognitive capacities of non-human primates. In The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (pp. 415–430). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511980435.024
