Relationship between Gender Difference and Students' Perceptions of Google Translate Use and Accuracy along with Difficulties

Abstract

Development of machine translation has hugely facilitated the task of translation across languages including Arabic. Due to a demand of more real-life and globally accessible translation software, Google Translate was developed to facilitate translations from and into languages in a fraction of time. The Arab speaking people turned their attention to Google Translate as a user-friendly, accessible and efficient to translate from and into Arabic specifically in relation to English language. However, although this tool is widely used by Arabic speakers, little knowledge is available about the students use and accuracy of Google Translate, particularly concerning gender differences in terms of student's perceptions of Google translate use and accuracy where the findings of previous studies are mixed. Recent literature on gender difference is rare. Specifically, in Iraqi context, study on association between gender and students' attitudes towards use and accuracy of Google Translate is underreported in literature or even absent. Thus, the current study was undertaken to examine the relationship between gender and perception of Google translate use and accuracy. The study adopted a survey approach and collected the data through using online questionnaire, created in Google Forms. The study also added one open-ended question to the end of questionnaire to explore student's difficulties in using Google Translates. The gathered data was analyzed by running descriptive and inferential analysis (one-way ANOVA and independent t-test) through SPSS Version 26. The findings of both ANOVA and t-test indicated that there was no significant correlation between gender and use, while they showed that there was a strong, positive significant meaningful difference between gender and accuracy of Google Translate. The content analysis of qualitative data showed that three themes, associated with Google Translate Difficulties, namely, lack of Accuracy, less accurate than human translation and internet connection emerged. The implications of the study findings are discussed.