Impact of Online Versus Hardcopy Dictionaries‟ Application on Translation Quality of Iranian M. A. Translation Students

The study aimed at investigating the impact of online versus hardcopy dictionaries‟ application on translation quality of senior M.A. students of translation based on Bleu model introduced by Papineni et al. (2002). To this end, using Oxford Proficiency test 50 (out of 70) female senior M.A. students of translation were selected and they were assigned to two groups: Online and hardcopy, using systematic sampling. Next, an English text was selected as the reference text. This reference text was given to three translators: 1) A male English translation expert with a Ph.D. degree in Computational Linguistics (Ref. 1); 2) A female English translation expert with an M.A. degree working at an English Translation Center and with more than 5 years of experience (Ref. 2), and 3) A male Ph.D. candidate in English translation (Ref. 3). These three versions were used as reference Persian standard translations to be entered into Bleu. Later, the English text was given to the hardcopy and online groups. Then, the translations of the participants were compared with the three reference Persian translations using Bleu. The time taken by each student to translate the text into Persian was also recorded. The results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the translations of the hardcopy and online groups from fluency/precision points of view. Comparison of the speed of translation in the two groups indicated that the online group was meaningfully faster. The possible beneficiaries of the findings of this research can be university professors, policy makers, and students in the realm of translation.