STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS ON AI TRANSLATION: A THEMATIC ANALYSIS

Abstrak

In addition to the availability of machine translation technologies such as Google Translate, people now have the option of employing Generative AI to carry out the translation tasks. GenAI is capable of producing translations in any language in a quick and efficient manner. Students in English department who might be interested in pursuing careers as language translators in the future, should have mastered artificial intelligence technologies in order to thrive in the world that is always changing. The purpose of this study is to investigate the students’ perceptions regarding the employment of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT for translating texts. This study was presented with two research questions, which are as follows: To what extent do students position AI translation tools in relation to human translation? When it comes to the employment of artificial intelligence for translation, what benefits and concerns shapes students’ attitude toward AI translation use?  In order to collect the necessary information for this study, interviews were conducted with twenty-two students from English department at Binus University who were enrolled in Translation course. The interview transcripts were used as the data for this study, and they were analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis framework developed by Braun and Clarke (2006).  There are three fundamental steps involved in doing thematic analysis. Starting with initial open coding, which involves classifying data into codes. The second step is grouping the similar codes and finally, defining and naming the themes for each group. Results show that five themes appear in this analysis. These are: conditional acceptance of AI translation, perceived advantages of AI translation, concerns about overdependence, human superiority in meaning, and ethical and institutional boundaries. The findings suggest that even though artificial intelligence translation is effective, it is still a limited tool that must continue to be controlled by humans.