Human Decision-Making and Editing Behavior in AI-Supported Translation: Evidence from EFL Student Translators
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54855/callej.262726Keywords:
AI-Translation, Editing behavior, Decision-making processAbstract
Many recent studies have investigated different types of technologies and AI-powered tools employed, and perceptions and evaluation of the AI users in translation. This study further closes the gap of literature by examining students’ behavior and decision-making process in different stages of translation tasks. The study was conducted with a group of 33 undergraduate EFL learners in a translation course in which AI tools were encouraged to use by the teacher. Data was collected from participants’ self-reflection survey, and individual stimulated recall interviews. The findings indicate that students’ decisions to employ AI are shaped by multiple interacting factors; rather than relying on AI uncritically, students positioned themselves as primary decision-makers, using AI selectively. Editing behaviors focused mostly on semantic and pragmatic, accompanied by higher-order cognitive processes. The study highlights the central role of humans and suggests that effective integration of AI in translation education requires careful pedagogical practice.
References
Algaraady, J., & Mahyoob, M. (2025). Exploring ChatGPT’s potential for augmenting editing in machine translation across multiple domains: challenges and opportunities. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 8, 1526293. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2025.1526293
Amini, M., Ravindran, L., & Lee, K.-F. (2024). Implications of using AI in translation studies: Trends, challenges, and future direction. Asian Journal of Research in Education and Social Sciences, 6(1), 740-754.
Asscher, O., & Glikson, E. (2021). Human evaluations of machine translation in an ethically charged situation. New Media & Society, 25(5), 1087-1107. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211018833
Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2015). Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. International Conference on Learning Representations.
Barrault, L., Chung, Y. A., Meglioli, M. C., Dale, D., Dong, N., Duquenne, P. A., *... & Wang, S. (2023). SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.11596
Bell, R. T. (1991). Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice. Longman.
Blazar, D., & Kraft, M.A. (2017). Teacher and Teaching Effects on Students’ Attitudes and Behaviors. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 39(1), 146-170. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373716670260
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Castaldo, A., Castilho, S., Moorkens, J., & Monti, J. (2025). Extending CREAMT: Leveraging Large Language Models for literary translation post-editing. Proceedings of the 20th Machine Translation Summit. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.03045
Castilho, S., Moorkens, J., Gaspari, F., Calixto, I., Tinsley, J., & Way, A. (2017). Is Neural Machine Translation the New State of the Art? The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, 108(1), 109-120. https://doi.org/10.1515/pralin-2017-0013
Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Chan, C. K. Y., & Hu, W. (2023). Students’ voices on generative AI: Perceptions, benefits, and challenges in higher education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20(1), 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-023-00411-8
Chung, E. S. (2023). L2 learners’ use of raw machine-translated output in reading comprehension. Computer-Assisted Language Learning Electronic Journal, 24(3), 1-19.
Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived Use-fulness, Perceived Ease of Use, And User Acceptance. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319-340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008
Davis, F. D. (1993). User Acceptance of Information Technology: System Characteristics, User Perceptions and Behavioral Impacts. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 38(3), 475-487. https://doi.org/10.1006/imms.1993.1022
Duong, T. T. H. (2024). Utilizing technology to assess English learning outcomes of students based on a competency-based approach. ICTE Conference Proceedings, 5, 49-63. https://doi.org/10.54855/ictep.2455
Doherty, S. (2016). The impact of translation technologies on the process and product of translation. International Journal of Communication, 10, 947-969.
Egdom, G.-W. van, & Pluymaekers, M. (2019). Why go the extra mile? How different degrees of post-editing affect perceptions of texts, senders and products among end users. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 31, 158–176. https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2019.181
Ferrag, F., & Bentounsi, I. A. (2024). The use of artificial intelligence in academic translation tasks: Case study of Chat GPT, Claude and Gemini. RA2LC, 11(2), 173-192. https://doi.org/10.60632/ziglobitha.n011.11.vol.2.2024
Fu, L., & Liu, L. (2024). What are the differences? A comparative study of generative artificial intelligence translation and human translation of scientific texts. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03726-7
Gaspari, F., & Hutchins, J. (2007). Online and free! Ten years of online machine translation: Origins, developments, current use and future prospects. In B. Maegaard (Ed.), Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Papers (pp.199-206). MT Summit 2007.
Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2016). Stimulated Recall Methodology in Applied Linguistics and L2 Research (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315813349
Gouadec, D. (2007). Translation as a profession. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Green, S., Heer, J., & Manning, C. D. (2013). The efficacy of human editing for language translation. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 439–448. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470718
Guerberof, A. (2009). Productivity and quality in MT post-editing. MT Summit XII-Workshop: Beyond Translation Memories: New Tools for Translators MT.
Hartono, R. (2024). Artificial intelligence in translation education: A combination of Google Translate and Grammarly for students’ accurate translation products. In N. A. S. Abdullah et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Computing, Engineering & Science Education (InvENT 2024) (Vol. 117, pp. 410-419). Advances in Computer Science Research. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-589-8_37
Hatim, B., & Munday, J. (2004). Translation: An Advanced Resource Book. Routledge.
He, Y. (2021). Challenges and countermeasures of translation teaching in the era of artificial intelligence. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1881(2), 022086. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1881/2/022086
Hutchins, W. J., & Somers, H. L. (1992). An introduction to machine translation. Academic Press.
Jia, Y., Carl, M., & Wang, X. (2019). How does the post-editing of neural machine translation compare with from-scratch translation? A product and process study. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 31, 60-86. https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2019.177
Ki, D., & Carpuat, M. (2024). Guiding large language models to post-edit machine translation with error annotations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024 (pp. 4253-4273). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.265
Kiger, M. E., & Varpio, L. (2020). Thematic analysis of qualitative data: AMEE Guide No. 131. Medical Teacher, 42(8), 846-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2020.1755030
Koehn, P. (2009). Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge University Press.
Koponen, M. (2016). Machine translation post-editing and effort: Empirical studies on the post-editing process. Doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki. http://hdl.handle.net/10138/160256
Kwok, H. L., Shi, Y., Xu, H., Li, D., & Liu, K. (2025). GenAI as a translation assistant? A corpus-based study on lexical and syntactic complexity of GPT-post-edited learner translation. System, 130, 103618. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2025.103618
Latief, M. R. A., Khaerana, A. S. A., & Soraya, A. I. (2022). Translation analysis: Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic strategies used in translating a website of an academic institution. ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 5(3), 524-531. https://doi.org/10.34050/elsjish.v5i3.23176
Läubli, S., Sennrich, R., & Volk, M. (2018). Has machine translation achieved human parity? A case for document-level evaluation. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (pp.4791-4796). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d18-1512
Lee, J., & Liao, P. (2011). A Comparative Study of Human Translation and Machine
Translation with Post-editing. Compilation and Translation Review, 4(2), 105-149. https://doi.org/10.29912/CTR.201109.0005
Lee, S. M. (2020). The impact of using machine translation on EFL students’ writing. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 33(3), 157-175. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2018.1553186
Lee, T. K. (2023). Artificial intelligence and posthuman translation: ChatGPT versus the translator. Applied Linguistics Review, 15(6), 2351-2372. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2023-0122
Li, X., & Daems, J. (2025). Does the perceived source of a translation (NMT vs. HT) impact student revision quality for news and literary texts? In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology (CTT) (pp. 14-26). European Association for Machine Translation.
Loock, R., & Holt, B. (2024). Augmented linguistic analysis skills: Machine translation and generative AI as pedagogical aids for analyzing complex English compounds. Technology in Language Teaching & Learning, 6(3), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.29140/tltl.v6n3.1489
Massardo, I., van der Meer, J., O’Brien, S., Hollowood, F., Aranberri, N., & Drescher, K. (2016). MT post-editing guidelines. Translation Automation User Society.
Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative content analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2), Article 20. https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1089/2385.
Melby, A. K. (2019). Future of machine translation: Musings on weaver’s memo. In M. O’Hagan (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology (pp. 419-436). Routledge.
Mohamed, Y. A., Khanan, A., Bashir, M., Mohamed, A. H. H. M., Adiel, M. A. E., & Elsadig, M. A. (2024). The impact of artificial intelligence on language translation: A review. IEEE Access, 12, 25553-25579. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3366802
Moneus, A. M., & Sahari, Y. (2024). Artificial intelligence and human translation: A contrastive study based on legal texts. Heliyon, 10(6), e28106. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e28106
Nazir, A., & Wang, Z. (2023). A comprehensive survey of ChatGPT: Advancements, applications, prospects, and challenges. Meta-Radiology, 1(2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metrad.2023.100022
Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook of translation. Prentice Hall.
Nida, E. A., & Taber, C. R. (Eds.). (1974). The theory and practice of translation (Vol. 8). Brill Archive.
Nord, C. (2001). Translating as a purposeful activity: Functionalist approaches explained. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351189354
Odacioglu, M. C., & Kokturk, S. (2015). The effects of technology on translation students in academic translation teaching. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 197, 1085-1094. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.07.349
Özmat, D., & Akkoyunlu, B. (2024). Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Translation in Education: Academic Perspectives and Student Approaches. Participatory Educational Research, 11 (H. Ferhan Odabaşı Gift Issue), 151-167. https://doi.org/10.17275/per.24.99.11.6
Pope, C., & Mays, N. (Eds.). (2006). Qualitative research in health care (3rd ed.). Blackwell Publishing.
Qian, M., Wu, H. Q., Yang, L., & Wan, A. (2023). Augmented machine translation enabled by GPT4: Performance evaluation on human-machine teaming approaches. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Tools and Resources for Translation and Interpreting Applications (pp. 20-31). INCOMA Ltd.
Rukiati, E., Wicaksono, J. A., Taufan, G. T., Suharsono, D. D. (2023). AI on learning English: Application, benefit, and threat. Journal of Language, Communication and Tourism, 1(2), 32-40. https://doi.org/10.25047/jlct.v1i2.3967
Shin, D., & Chon, Y. V. (2023). Second language learners’ post-editing strategies for machine translation errors. Language Learning & Technology, 27(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.64152/10125/73523
Siu, S. C. (2023). ChatGPT and GPT-4 for professional translators: Exploring the potential of large language models in translation. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4448091
Škobo, M., & Petričević, V. D. (2023). Navigating the challenges and opportunities of literary translation in the age of AI: Striking a balance between human expertise and machine power. Društvene i humanističke Studije (Online), 8(2), 317-336. https://doi.org/10.51558/2490-3647.2023.8.2.317
Tekwa, K. (2024). Artificial intelligence, corpora, and translation studies. In D. Li & J. Corbett (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Translation Studies (pp. 103-118). Routledge.
Vela-Valido, J. (2021). Translation quality management in the AI Age. New technologies to perform translation quality assurance operations. Revista Tradumàtica: Translation Technologies, 19, 93-111. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/tradumatica.285
Venkatesh, V. & Davis, F.D. (2000). A Theoretical Extension of the Technology Acceptance Model: Four Longitudinal Field Studies. Management Science ,46(2), 186-204. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.46.2.186.11926
Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D. (2003). User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view. MIS Quarterly, 27(3), 425-478. https://doi.org/10.2307/30036540
Venkatesh, V., Thong, J. Y. L., & Xu, X. (2012). Consumer acceptance and use of information technology: Extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. MIS Quarterly, 36(1), 157. https://doi.org/10.2307/41410412
Vieira, L. N. (2017). From process to product: Links between post-editing effort and post-edited quality. In A. L. Jakobsen & B. Mesa-Lao (Eds.), Translation in transition: Between cognition, computing and technology (pp. 162-186). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Vieira, L. N. (2019). Post-editing of machine translation. In M. O'Hagan (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology (pp. 319-335). Routledge.
Wallwork, A. (2016). Using Google Translate and analyzing student-and GT-generated mistakes. In A. Wallwork (Ed.), English for academic research: A guide for teachers (pp. 55-68). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32687-0_5
Wang, Y. (2023). Artificial intelligence technologies in college English translation teaching. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 52(5), 1525-1544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09960-5
Wang, Y., Li, X., Yang, Y., Anwar, A., & Dong, R. (2021). Hybrid System Combination Framework for Uyghur–Chinese Machine Translation. Information, 12(3), 98. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12030098
Wilss, W. (1982). The Science of Translation: Problems and Methods. Gunter Narr Verlag.
Wu, C., Yu, H., Moorhouse, B. L., & Wu, M. (2025). Unveiling students’ experiences and perspectives of generative AI-assisted translation in a Hong Kong university: Perceived benefits, limitations, and suggestions. Digital Applied Linguistics, 2, 102600-102600. https://doi.org/10.29140/dal.v2.102600
Yang, Y., Liu, R., Qian, X., & Ni, J. (2023). Performance and perception: Machine translation post-editing in Chinese English news translation by novice translators. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02285-7
Yuxiu, Y. (2024). Application of translation technology based on AI in translation teaching. Systems and Soft Computing, 6, 200072. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sasc.2024.200072
Zhai, X., Chu, X., Wang, M., Tsai, C. C., Liang, J. C., & Spector, J. M. (2024). A systematic review of Stimulated Recall (SR) in educational research from 2012 to 2022. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02987-6
Zhang, J. (2025). Machine translation in translator training: Its impact on students’ translation processes and products (Doctoral thesis, University of New South Wales). UNSWorks. https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/31232
Zhang, R., & Zou, D. (2020). Types, purposes, and effectiveness of state-of-the-art technologies for second and foreign language learning. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 35(4), 696-742. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2020.1744666
Zhang, W., Li, A. W., & Wu, C. (2025). University students’ perceptions of using Generative AI in translation practices. Instructional Science, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09705-y
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Author and CALL-EJ

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright of articles is retained by authors and CALL-EJ. As CALL-EJ is an open-access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. Sources must be acknowledged appropriately.