This study explores the effects of adopting machine translation (MT) post-editing tasks as technology-mediated feedback activities to reinforce not only learners’ translation competence but also overall writing skills including accuracy, word choice, sentence fluency, etc. MT post-editing refers to tasks of editing and correcting a pre-translated text processed by a machine translator from a source language into the target language (Allen, 2003), and its procedure is similar to giving peer feedback to other students in a traditional language classroom (Garcia and Pena, 2011; Kliffer, 2005). A substantial amount of research has supported advantages of peer feedback (Correa, 2014; Rollinson, 2005) and a result of our recent pilot project yields effectiveness of MT post-editing in Korean in accordance with prior studies. Therefore, this study 1) adopts MT post-editing as peer feedback, 2) examines what the learners’ perception is about MT post-editing, and 3) investigates how it affects Korean language learners’ improvement on their linguistic competence and target language accuracy. This study will be conducted in colleges in the U.S. and all the participants are English speaking advanced Korean language learners. Data from the participants will be collected through analysis on their MT post-editing works and semi-structured interviews. Students will be assigned three MT articles (English to Korean) and then asked to post-edit them. Also, original English articles will be presented to help the students better see deficiencies in MT articles. Students’ post-editing works will be then coded and analyzed based on structural and lexical accuracy, cultural referencing, message translation, register, and adequacy. After analyzing students’ post-editing work, semi-structured interviews will be conducted to examine the students’ perceptions of MT post-editing and its impact on their learning in terms of promoting linguistic competence. This study further will discuss the pedagogical implications of MT post-editing as peer feedback in foreign language classrooms.
