Second language learning: finding ways to successfully integrate ICT resources and right strategies for language learning, translation and interpreting

Abstract

Second language learning: finding ways to integrate ICT resources and right strategies for language learning, translation and interpreting Second language learning has gained importance as language accreditations have become imperative for any profession or academic career. Undergraduate students in Philology, Translation Studies, Tourism Studies or the like follow language accreditation programmes in order to be able to compile a valid and solid CV when they complete their degrees, master or PhD programmes. In the case of Translation students, they are subjects with strong motivation for language learning applied to translation or interpreting tasks. Language technologies and tools constitute an essential part of their learning processes and language teachers should find a way of optimising the use of these resources. For this purpose, we have conducted a survey among students, trying to find out which web resources they use, how they use them (or not) and why. Using these data, we considered new strategies to help students get the most out of these tools; in particular, we analysed the pros and cons of machine translation tools, such as deepL and Google Translator, as well as corpus linguistics tools.