Google Translate Performance in Translating English Passive Voice into Indonesian

A scant number of Google Translate users and researchers continue to be skeptical of the current Google Translate's performance as a machine translation tool. As English passive voice translation often brings problems, especially when translated into Indonesian which rich of affixes, this study works to analyze the way Google Translate (MT) translates English passive voice into Indonesian and to investigate whether Google Translate (MT) can do modulation. The data in this research were in the form of clauses and sentences with passive voice taken from corpus data. It included 497 news articles from the online news platform ‘GlobalVoices,' which were processed with AntConc 3.5.8 software. The data in this research were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to achieve broad objectives, depth of understanding, and the corroboration. Meanwhile, the comparative methods were used to analyze both source and target texts. Through the cautious process of collecting and analyzing the data, the results showed that (1) GT (via NMT) was able to translate the English passive voice by distinguishing morphological changes in Indonesian passive voice (2) GT was able to modulate English passive voice into Indonesian base verbs and Indonesian active voice.

A Case Study of Students’ Barriers in Passive Voice Sententes

This study was to find out the errors experienced by students in composing passive voice sentences. It also explained the factors that caused students' barriers in constructing passive voice sentences. This study focused on students' errors and bariers in constructing passive voice sentences in the form of Simple Present Tense, Simple Past Tense, and Present Future Perfect Tense. The research approach used was a qualitative method through a case study. The subject of this research was 12 students in class XII of SMKS Yaspenmas Sei Lepan. Data collection techniques were tests and interviews. The findings of this study were the types of student errors on omission 62.4%, misinformation 10.6%, misordering 27%. As well as the location of the error in the passive voice sentence in the form of Simple Present Tense in the use of to be 75%, past participle 100%, then the use of to be in the Simple Past Tense 95, 83% and past participle 64.6%, then the use of have in Present Future Perfect Tense 36.1%, been 100%, and past participle 33.3%. These errors were due to internal factors and external factors. The internal factors were students’ lack of interest in learning English as well as lack of vocabulary mastery and lack of understanding of grammar. The external factors were lack of parental attention, lack of supporting media in the learning process, inadequate school infrastructures, and the road to school was difficult to pass.

THE DELETION OF THE HUMAN AGENT IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE DISCOURSE: AN ECOLINGUISTIC STUDY

This study explores the use of the strategy of erasure in environmental science discourses to explore the deletion of the agent. Three environmental science textbooks have been chosen for analysis. Stibbe’s (2015) framework of erasure has been used as a model for analyzing the data. He asserts that the natural world is marginalized in texts through the use of certain linguistic strategies; these strategies run throughout the whole discourse to construct the erasure of the ecosystem. The researchers aim to identify erasure at the level of void, which is the complete erasure or deletion of the agent from these discourses. Stibbe mentions nine linguistic strategies for the construction of erasure in environmental discourses. These strategies are passive voice, nominalization, co-hyponymy, hyponymy, metaphor, metonymy, construction of noun phrases, transitivity patterns and massification. For the construction of void, the researchers have analyzed the strategies of passivization and nominalization. It has been found that these strategies are pervasive in the discourses, thereby deleting the agent and constructing void. The study suggests a new way to look at the language of ecological discourses and proposes further studies on how euphemistic language in these discourses can negatively influence readers. Keywords: erasure, mask, void, environmental discourse

Functioning of the verb’s reflexive voice in the modern Udmurt language

Introduction. Any language’s verb system has many resources for denoting various actions of people. The relations of the action or state of the subject to its object are determined by the grammatical category of the voice, represented in the Udmurt language by the pairs of causative – non-causative, reflexive – non-reflexive forms of voices. The article considers the functioning of the verb’s reflexive voice in the modern Udmurt language, including the etymology of the voice’s affix, the grammatical meanings of reflexive verbs. Materials and Methods. The main material of the research is based on the Udmurt-Russian Dictionary (2008) and the texts of Udmurt writers included into the National Corpus of the Udmurt Language. The article used a set of such research methods as descriptive, continuous sampling, contextual analysis, taking into account the situational conditioning of the verb voice. On specific examples, the use of these methods makes it possible to consider the structure, dynamics and features of the functioning of the reflexive voice of the verb in the Udmurt language. Results and Discussion. As a result of the research, for the first time, among the reflexive voice’s groups we include verbs of passive voice. The reason of it is the low probability of using passive constructions in colloquial speech. The frequent cases of using passive meanings of verbs in the literature and in the press are defined by the calcified translation of foreign-language constructions. Conclusion. The grammatical structure of the Udmurt language is represented by two binary voice’s forms: reflexive/non-reflexive voice and causative/non-causative voice. Specific indicators of reflexive voice are affixes -ськ(ы)-/-ск(ы), -иськ(ы)-/-üськ(ы)-. From the point of view of semantic content, five semantic groups of returnable pledges are distinguished: reflexive, medial, reciprocal, impersonal, passive. The proposed classification is determined by the specifics of the relations between the subject and the object of action.

Difficulties of Understanding English Breaking News Headlines by Iraqi EFL Learners at the University Level

Understanding breaking news necessitates a special attention, since they are written with a special style. The study aims at identifying the difficulties faced by the Iraqi university EFL learners in comprehending English breaking news. The study included 10 fourth year students enrolled at the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar. Thus, a questionnaire as a research instrument, was sent online to the students. The questionnaire points were related to the identification of difficulties faced by the learners in comprehending English breaking news. The data of the study were (10) headlines selected purposively from Euronews website. The data were qualitatively analyzed based on quantifying the quality procedure. The findings showed that (54%) of the total number of the students stated that the headlines are difficult to understand, and (46%) considered them easy. Based on these findings, the study has concluded that students faced four main difficulties: neologism, difficult vocabulary, ellipsis, and passive voice when reading news headlines. Neologism has scored the highest percentage (32.4324%), while passive voice has been the lowest (5.4054%).

Current Implementation and Future Prospects of Santi-Morf V.1.0

SANTI-Morf (Prihantoro, 2021) is a new morphological analyser for Indonesian. In SANTI-Morf annotation scheme (Prihantoro, 2019), morpheme tokens are linked to their annotations. The tokens are presented in their orthographic and citation forms to allow (allo)morph or morpheme-based searches. Users can also perform retrievals on the basis of formal and functional morphological criteria as SANTI-Morf tagset encodes the analyses of morphemes’ forms (e.g. roots, clitics, affix type) and functions (e.g. passive voice, active voice, adjective degrees, etc.). Currently, the scheme is implemented in Nooj (Silberztein, 2003), a linguistic development environment. It enables users to index and annotate Indonesian texts in their local PC, and later perform searches based on morphological criteria and or tokens defined by the SANTI-Morf scheme. AbstrakSANTI-Morf (Prihantoro, 2021) adalah sebuah program analisis morfologi terbaru untuk bahasa Indonesia. Dalam skema anotasi SANTI-morf (Prihantoro, A new tagset for morphological analysis of Indonesian, 2019), setiap token morfem terhubung dengan anotasinya. Token-token ini direpresentasikan dalam bentuk ortografis dan bentuk sitasi sehingga memungkinkan pengguna untuk melakukan penelusuran berbasis (alo)morf atau morfem. Selain itu, pengguna juga bisa melakukan penelusuran berbasiskan bentuk atau fungsi morfem. Ini karena tagset analitik yang digunakan di SANTI-morf mencakup bentuk (di antaranya: akar, klitik, jenis afiksasi) dan fungsi (di antaranya: aktif, pasif, derajat ajektiva). Saat ini, SANTI-morf diimplementasikan menggunakan NooJ (Silberztein, 2003), sebuah program pengembangan aplikasi linguistik. Pengguna dapat mengindeks dan menganotasi teks berbahasa Indonesia di komputer mereka, dan selanjutnya melakukan penelusuran menggunakan kriteria morfologi dan skema tokenisasi yang digunakan di skema anotasi SANTI-morf.

Strategies for Translating English Passive Sentences into Vietnamese

This study examines some most common strategies for the Vietnamese translation of English passive voice such as “The use of markers ‘được’/‘bị’”, “Change to active”, “Paraphrasing” in order to find out the frequency and the rules for the use of those strategies by collecting and analyzing the data from the English and Vietnamese versions of a novel named “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and a book named “A Brief History of Time”. And the findings of this study disapproves the view that Vietnamese active sentences are the dominant choice for translating English passive voice since its results indicate that English It-clefts or English agentless passive sentences where the agent of the action is unclear or concerned with generalization rather than specific individuals have a high tendency of being translated into active structures in Vietnamese while using a marker like 'được' or 'bị' and subject-less active sentences are the primary ways for translating other kinds of English agentless passive sentences into Vietnamese. Besides, the results of the research also indicate that the use of markers 'được'/'bị' is frequently applied to translate agent-included passives, but the position of the agent in Vietnamese sentences varies according to its features.

Challenges of Short Sentence Writing Encounter 1st Year Uundergraduate Students in English Language Departments at Al-Baha University

This study aims to find out the most common challenges of writing short sentences encountered by first-year English-major undergraduate students of English language departments. A mixed method was used including quantitative and qualitative as data was obtained using student questionnaires and interview questions for the lecturers. About 122 first-year English-major undergraduate students (%50.4 female and %49.6 male) from the English Language Departments at all colleges of Al-Baha University were randomly chosen, including 30 lecturers, and were interviewed in the study (15 males and 15 females). The study revealed significant results which have shown difficulties in constructing short sentences, the distinction of active and passive voice, and the use of conjunctions, punctuations, quantifiers, and the correct auxiliary. Also among common issues, students find difficulties in using comparative and superlative degree, subject–verb agreement and the use of articles. Thus, the study recommends that first-year English-major undergraduate students should be given more written exercises as well as written feedback so that students can be able to write more effective short sentences. The study suggests that more studies could be conducted qualitative researches for first-year students of English language department to investigate and analyze the most common challenges and difficulties of the students’ written samples or documents.

ESP: A NEEDS ANALYSIS OF MARITIME ENGLISH AT POLIMARIN

As an archipelagic country, Indonesia has long been known for its marine potential. This potential comes with new challenges, one of them being language problem. In this regard, English shows its prominent role as the international language to bridge communications. This research provided a needs analysis to identify the “necessities”, “lacks”, and “wants” in relation with English usage in maritime sector, specifically for those conducting internship at international ships. A qualitative approach and a descriptive design were applied in this research. The respondents consisted of 19 students of Polimarin who had completed internship at international ships, selected through total sampling technique. Their responses were collected by a questionnaire, complemented by interview. The collected data were then processed through a model consisting of four stages; data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The “necessities” analysis revealed speaking and vocabulary as the most needed language skill and component. The “lacks” analysis showed that the syllabus used pays attention to English language skills and components evenly and that some respondents were underprepared before doing internship. The “wants” analysis came up with the simple present tense and the simple past tense as the most wanted tenses to master, pronouns as the most wanted grammatical feature and passive voice as the least wanted, all language functions evenly wanted, and group discussion as the most preferred learning activity. In conclusion, syllabus revision is due to improve the quality of English learning by accommodating the students’ “necessities”, “lacks”, and “wants”. Key words:ESP, Maritime English, Needs Analysis

'GRAMMARLY' AS A TEACHERS' ALTERNATIVE IN EVALUATING NON -EFL STUDENTS WRITINGS

In evaluating students’ EFL writing, lecturers nowadays can implement corrective evaluation by using an online automatic software. Grammarly is automated online software that is comonly used in EFL writing classes. It is an internet proofreading service that evaluates the correctness grammarl, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary as well as detects plagiarism. This paper reports research aimed at exploring the use of Grammarly software for evaluating non-EFL students’ writings. This research employed descriptive-qualitative method with students of ITB AAS Indonesia as the data sources. The results of analysis show that in correcting students' language errors, lecturers can evaluate and analyze in details without a lot of correcting efforts or improvements. Grammarly can be considered as a useful tool for lecturers who need to correct non-EFL students’ writings. Grammarly will automatically check or detect the work being typed from various related aspects. Various writing errors made by the students were found in Grammarly’s reports, both in the aspect of correctness and clarity. Correctness is concerned with the mechanical norms in writing, whereas clarity deals with concise and direct language use. The spelling errors found in students’ writings are text inconsistencies, misspelled words, and improper formatting whereas for grammatical there are subject-verb disagreement, passive voice misuse, as well as unclear, wordy, and incomplete sentences. Meanwhile, the errors in punctuation are shown by inappropriate use of punctuation marks in compound/complex sentence, comma misuse within clauses, and improper formatting. It can be concluded that Grammarly can be an alternative for lecturers’ in evaluating non-EFL students' writings.