O n f e r e n c e

Yong-Ming Huang
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Informatics 
and Multimedia, Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Taiwan. He received his 
Ph.D. degree in Engineering Science from the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan in 
2012. His research interests include Web 2.0, ubiquitous learning, cloud computing and 
collaborative learning. 
Abstract 
Translation is a difficult undertaking, and numerous students experience difficulties in 
translating from English to Chinese and Chinese to English. This is particularly the case 
with long and complicated sentences, and errors in their organizing information often 
result in wrong interpretation of the intended meaning in the context (Liao, 2006). In 
order to ease the task of undertaking translation, Chang and Hsu (2013) reported that 
students’ reading was enhanced when carried out collaboratively in small groups 
compared to when such activities were carried out individually. The current study sought 
to extend the concept of collaborative reading to a collaborative translation activity to 
determine whether collaboration could have a positive impact on learners’ abilities to 
undertake the difficult task of translation.
Forty-two students in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages were recruited from 
two intact translation classes at a technical university in southern Taiwan. They were 
divided into two groups. In the control group (n=18), learners collaborated through 
sharing their answers written in a Microsoft Word document, whereas in the experimental 
group (n=24), the learners translated the document simultaneously using Google Docs. 
The experiment lasted for one semester in the translation class. Students were asked to 
complete a pretest with sentence completion with filling in blanks and writing short 
paragraphs, completing an article translation activity done by three people in a group, a 
posttest with similar test items and essays as the pretest, and finally a UTAUT survey. 
After the activity, learners were invited to complete a web-based survey with open-ended 
questions. The different characteristics of the two collaboration formats were examined, 
and the challenges of carrying out such activities through the two formats are discussed 
in terms of 
learners’
perceptions and intention to work online simultaneously and how 
collaborative translation has the potential to enhance learners’ translation procedure.
 

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-241- 
2014 CALL Conference 
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