Were students who had English as an Additional Language (EAL) composing work in their first language and then translating this through online language translation tools?Īre there indicators which can identify the use of on-line paraphrasing tools?Īll examples of unusual writing provided in this article are indicative of the nature of the student writing encountered but have been altered to retain anonymity while preserving the features of the linguistic anomalies. Were students using online paraphrasing tools to manipulate work which was written in English and which had not been authored by them? This led us to consider the following questions: In an assessment task set for first year undergraduate Health Science students in a pathway program, an alarming proportion of submitted work, nearly 10%, demonstrated linguistic contortions similar to the example given. We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text.Ī situation that can give resistance and additionally generally safe for botches, and that inspects choices without assaulting the pride and nobility of the individual influencing them, to will prompt better natural decisions.
The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool. In order to test the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology. In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language.