machine interlanguage

this weblog has an odd schizophrenia: on the one hand, it's an official blog, used for my presentations on plagiarism, which have now numbered two discussions and perhaps one other, now I've almost forgotten. Why is this? And there were none last year; I didn't try. Why not?

Well, that's one side of it- a professional interest, gently petering out into oblivion. Here's the other. Sometimes I use it for deeply personal rambles about the personal nature of grading students' writing. It is intensely personal. Sure, I leave it professional: I don't name names; I make sure that any of my students could read it (it is, after all, published, even advertised on my own professional blog)- and not get steamed. They are, after all, trying their best. And paying big money. And not, necessarily, even aware of the cheating nature of plagiarism.

Before I go into this second one, which I consider very interesting, I will mention a third, which is a passing desire to record and ruminate on a public scandal here at this institution, which, I would hope, is over, or at least, best forgotten. And better forgotten if I move it on down with this ramble.

OK so here's what I'm thinking. As a writing teacher who sees volumes and volumes of words- last term stacks of 38 passed across my desk; I read each one; I even read the articles they were attached to- I think I know pure plagiarism when I see it, and I see plenty. But I also see a lot of hybrid plagiarism. This is how it works. In the old days, students learned words one at a time; they wrote their native languages next to them, and, as they used the new ones, they used them in the fashion that they would have used their native-language counterpart. It was called "interference" as their native language was the single most salient factor in what we teachers saw as an "error"- a misused word, a wrong order, a something or other.

Nowadays there's another player- technology. The article that they were to have read and responded to, in writing, can be presumed to have been run through a translator- that systematically changed every word, even the ones they knew in English. This translator put a kind of soup on their plate- native words, English word order- changed by whatever else their technology provided. This is the actual article their understanding is based upon.

Then, as they began to write, some of them presumably chose to write in native language, and shove that through a translator. Now, they were fully aware that the word order would be wrong- the grammar would be wrong- that they would have to then apply English rules to the English words that landed on their paper, in whatever order. So, they did. To the best of their ability.

And we wonder why the product looks different than it used to. The words- very similar to the ones in the article. The word order- so garbled we can hardly imagine it even came from their native language- though it did. It just took a different path than it used to.

I think deep studying needs to be done on this process- it's not plagiarism, per se. It's machine interlanguage- maybe I'll come up with a snappy name. I'll keep working on it. Promise.