The development of the Internet in the 1990s, the introduction of Google Translate machine translation in 2007, and the launch of Google Translator Toolkit in July 2009, have progressively changed the perspectives of teachers of translation and their students in terms of their expectations in relation to translation training, the translation process and its product. If, in the past, instruction in translation was to a large extent predicated upon teacher resourcefulness and the physical availability of parallel and similar texts, today it entails the introduction of freely available Internet resources, as well as training commensurate with their professional application and utilization.
This article presents the preliminary results of an ongoing study focusing on the modes and frequency of use of the Internet, Google Translate and Google Translation Toolkit among fairly advanced translation students, together with the findings of questionnaires that have been prepared in relation to the use of these resources by students in the translation of short texts. It concludes with the author’s observations as to the applicability of these resources in translator training and the challenges thereof.
M. Koletnik Korošec, University of Maribor