Wizard or misleading? Error-prone English learning apps should be managed

Xinhua News Agency, Guiyang, March 17 Title: Guide or Misleading? Error-prone English learning apps should be managed

Xinhua News Agency's "Xinhua Viewpoint" reporters Ou Dianqiu, Wu Si, and Cui Xiaoqiang

Looking up words and memorizing words on mobile apps has become the habit of college students, middle school students and English learning enthusiasts, and electronic dictionaries on apps have almost replaced most paper dictionaries.

However, the "Xinhua Viewpoint" reporter's investigation found that many English learning Apps with more than 100 million users frequently have content errors such as spelling, phonetic transcription, and translation.

You may have learned the wrong word

- Misspelling.

NetEase Youdao Dictionary shows 900 million installs in a mobile phone application market. On the app, the English vocabulary corresponding to "academic system" is queried, and the results are displayed as educational systme. Check the entry "academic system" in the "New Century Chinese-English Dictionary" published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, and the result is educational system.

In this regard, Chen Juan, associate professor of the School of Foreign Chinese of Guizhou University, said: "The dictionary query results published by the Foreign Research Agency are correct, and both words in the index systme entry of NetEase Youdao Dictionary have misspelled. ”

Look up the entry a crisis of capitalis in the Hujiang Small D Dictionary and get Chinese entry as "capitalist crisis". The reporter consulted the "English-Chinese Dictionary" published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House and the "Oxford High-Level English-Chinese Dictionary" published by the Commercial Press, and one of the interpretations of crisis was "crisis", but the word capitalis could not be found; consulting the "New Century Chinese-English Dictionary", the English word corresponding to "capitalist" was capitalist.

The reporter searched on Weibo, webpage, Tieba and other platforms to get 19 spelling and word meaning errors on the English learning App, the main error content is Chinese interpretation error, English alphabetical arrangement error, phrase meaning error, etc., not only involving Chinese-English dictionaries, but also involving Chinese-German, Chinese-Japanese and other dictionaries, most of which have been corrected.

- Phonetic transcription error. For a back-word App that has been downloaded and installed 300 million times, Weibo netizens pointed out that the App marked the phonetic transcription of hum as /həm/, and posted a screenshot on Weibo.

The reporter consulted the Oxford High-Level English-Chinese Dictionary, and the phonetic transcription of hum should be /hʌm/. After the netizen reported the error, the reporter checked the back word App and learned that the phonetic transcription error has now been corrected.

Xiao Chen, a student at Guizhou Normal University, found that the app marked the phonetic transcription of the word resume as /ˈrezəmeɪ/, and noted the meaning of the word as a verb and noun. In an English speaking test, Xiao Chen took the verb meaning of reume and said reume according to the phonetic transcription of /ˈrezəmeɪ/, but was deducted points. The teacher explained that resume as a verb is pronounced /rɪˈzu:m/. Only then did I discover that the verbs and nouns of this word were pronounced differently, and I was misled by the hundred words. Xiao Chen said.

The reporter obtained a total of 25 phonetic transcription and pronunciation errors on the English learning App, most of which have been corrected after netizens reported errors. The reporter found that for one of the back word App, since 2012, almost every year netizens have reported errors, and the wrong content involves phonetic transcription spelling errors, accent errors, pronunciation and phonetic transcription are not correct, British pronunciation and American pronunciation are confused, etc.

- Translation error. In Jinshan Ciba, "Peng Hui said that at that time, the workers in the mine were all laid off and could only go out to work. The translation is shown as "Peng Hui said that at that time, the mine workers were laid off, can only go out to work."

Zhou Qian, a lecturer in the English Department of Tongren College International College, said: "In the above translation, were inconsistent with the tense of the two verbs can, and there are grammatical errors; were laid off and can only go out to work directly in accordance with the Syntactic customs of The Chinese language, separated by commas, the quality of the translation is not good." ”

In the NetEase Youdao Dictionary, enter "Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, has a regional GDP of 431.165 billion yuan in 2020." The translated result was "In 2020, the GDP of Guiyang City in Guizhou Province will reach 431.165 billion yuan."

"There are obvious grammatical errors in the above translation, in 2020 is a time adjective, which belongs to the past time, while the translation predicate verb uses the general future tense. The addition of prepositions between provincial and municipal place names is not authentic enough. Chen Juan said.

According to a research result of a project at the Nanguo Business School of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, the researchers used Chinese petroleum geology literature as the source text to analyze and evaluate its English translation on seven popular online translation platforms at home and abroad. Studies have found that its translations have problems in word meaning, part of speech, word order, sentence structure, sentence breakage, noun grammar marking, collocation, punctuation, letter case, and information integrity.

Did the error come by chance?

Compared with the paper dictionary, the English learning app undoubtedly has the characteristics of quick query, easy to carry, and rich functions, but the hidden errors are becoming a trap on the way for students to learn. How do these errors occur?

Why are some interpretations, example sentences, phonetic transcriptions, etc. wrong? NetEase Youdao Dictionary replied to reporters: "There will be different presentations, mainly because the interpretation and phonetic transcription in international standards and practical applications are not static, but will change with the development of the English system and the changes in the new language environment." We make real-time dynamic adjustments according to the latest International Phonetic Alphabet standards. ”

Obviously, this reply does not explain why the NetEase Youdao Dictionary has the problem of incorrect entry content. As of press time, Jinshan Ciba, Baizi Chop, and Hujiang Small D Dictionary have not replied to reporters on the reasons for the relevant errors.

Chen Juan believes that the error in the entry of the electronic dictionary reflects the lack of professional quality of the writers, the lack of responsibility, and the irresponsibility of the work. Students are misled by frequently using substandard electronic dictionaries.

Du Enlong, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Zhejiang University of Communication, pointed out that the word search function in the English learning app is actually a built-in electronic dictionary, which in fact plays the same dictionary tool function as the paper dictionary published by the publishing house.

"The publication of paper dictionaries undergoes very strict three-six proofreading, and electronic dictionaries are managed as ordinary electronic products or software. Therefore, although many producers of mobile electronic dictionaries in the market do not have publishing qualifications, do not have lexicography qualifications, and even lack sufficient editing power, they compile electronic thesaurus and implant them in Apps or other mobile terminals. This is the main reason why there are errors in the entries on the app. Duane Long said.

A review of the thesaurus of some English learning Apps found that the interpretation of the same term has both the term definition of the authoritative publishing dictionary authorized for use by the App and the interpretation compiled by the App itself, and the errors found by netizens are often concentrated in the latter.

On the issue of translation errors, Luo Yihong, an associate researcher at the Guizhou Academy of Social Sciences, said that it depends on the advanced degree of machine translation technology used in the app. "At present, the more advanced translation technology is neural network machine translation technology and statistical machine translation technology, but neither technology is enough to be 100% accurate, let alone replace human translation."

The person in charge of NetEase Youdao Dictionary admitted that although the current neural network machine translation is a cutting-edge technology in the world, and there have been certain achievements in the industry, there is still a lot of room for expansion. As an important development area of artificial intelligence, machine translation still needs to make a lot of efforts in the future.

Who's in charge? How to manage?

Who cares about the content of English learning apps? The relevant person in charge of the local market supervision and administration bureau said that it does not have the right to supervise the content of English learning apps. The relevant person in charge of the publishing department said that only English learning apps can be investigated and dealt with for copyright infringement. The relevant person in charge of the education department said that it has no right to supervise the English learning app.

Duenlong said that the content regulation of English learning apps and their built-in electronic dictionaries is currently in a gray area. "Electronic dictionaries and apps with the nature of dictionary tools cannot be managed simply as general electronic products or software. The content quality standards of electronic dictionaries should be clarified through the revision of publication regulations, the management department should be further clarified, and the market access conditions should be strictly enforced. He said.

Xiao Yang, deputy dean of the School of Communication of East China Normal University, said that in order to ensure the accuracy of the content of English learning Apps, it is first necessary to standardize the source of content and ensure that the authorization of dictionaries is legal. On this basis, in order to adapt to the trend of mobile development, dictionary publishers can strengthen cooperation with software developers and work together to standardize knowledge platforms.

"It is recommended that relevant departments strengthen the norms and require app operators to prominently mark the words 'the translated content cannot be guaranteed to be completely accurate', which will serve as a reminder for learners." Li Linfang, a practicing lawyer at Guizhou Senqian Law Firm, said.

Liu Junhai, a professor at the Law School of Chinese Min University, believes that English learning apps with a huge number of users should focus on monitoring, supervise the removal of apps with serious content defects, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of teenagers, especially students.