Behavioral and Problematic Issues Related to the Use of Google Translate: A Case Study of English Major Students at Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya Rajabhat University
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Abstract
The primary objective of this research was to study the behavioral and problematic issues in relation to the use of Google Translate, a universally popular translation program, by students majoring in English at Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya Rajabhat University. Selected by purposive sampling, the sample comprised 65 fourth-year English major students from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya Rajabhat University. The research instruments consisted of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Descriptive statistics, including frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation, as well as qualitative content analysis were implemented to analyze the data.
The results on the behavioral issues indicated that students used Google Translate the most frequently. Mobile phones and tablets were major devices on which they accessed the program. The two principal purposes for which they used Google Translate were to help them study and do their homework and to translate entertainment media and social media messages. Moreover, the results on the problematic issues revealed that when translating texts via Google Translate, students regularly confronted certain problems; namely, the translation program could not translate texts with social and cultural terms effectively ( = 4.41), there were several errors in the tense translation ( = 4.20), and some words or sentences were omitted quite often when translating at the paragraph or discourse level, resulting in a distortion of the overall meaning ( = 4.18).
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