Paper Title
An Exploratory Study of The Adoption of Machine Translation in China

Abstract
Teaching with technology in translation education is still in a preliminary stage in China. There is limited empirical research conducted to explore the strengths and drawbacks of free online machine translation (FOMT), and the extent it can assist humans in translation. The present study is a mini empirical study consisting of three parts. The first part investigates the performance of FOMT in translating eight randomly selected business texts between English and Chinese. The second part is a reflection on the use of FOMT by four undergraduate English major students who have limited prior exposure to MT. The final part is an interview of a professional translator on the use of MT in the translation industry in Wenzhou, China. Results contradict the current finding of neural machine translation (NMT) in contributing significantly higher productivity than phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) in rendering bigger units of meaning beyond the sentence level. It was found that there are far more FOMT cannot do than it can do in its performance, and the machine-generated outputs still require significant human editing for improving their quality. Moreover, the participants of this research project generally support using FOMT in assisting translation though they are very cautiousand are well-aware of its strengths and drawbacks in using it as an assisting tool for translation. Finally, it was discovered that MT still might not be so widely used in the translation industry in China. Clients’ negative attitude and resistance against its use might be a possible reason hindering its widespread adoption in the industry. The findings of the present research shed light on how MT can be integrated into the translation curriculum to cultivate students’ awareness of its value, enhance their competency in and for translation, and prepare them better for the market of the real world. Keywords - Post-editing of machine translation (PEMT), Free online machine translation (FOMT), teaching with technology in translation education