Evaluating the Chinese-English Translations in Duolingo

Duolingo is a gamified language-learning app that mainly uses grammar translation method. The main weakness of Duolingo method is that Duolingo frequently offers only one acceptable translation, thus restricts the possibility of other variations. This study aims to evaluate the translation accuracy of Duolingo against the students’ translations. The participants for this study were 20 Chinese Department students and 15 English Department students at a private university in Jakarta. The materials for testing were a Chinese lesson about sports in Duolingo, which was played in real time in the classrooms. As the focus of this study is on translation, only the translation of full sentences from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese were taken as the data. The translation results were analysed qualitatively to find out the structural and semantic differences between the students’ and the Duolingo’s translations. The results showed that students’ translations are considered incorrect by Duolingo because of their inadequate knowledge of Chinese and English sentence structure and the word-by-word translation technique used. However, some alternative translations are unaccepted by Duolingo since they are not following the standard Duolingo translation. The results imply that Duolingo needs to cater for more variations instead of only accepting one variety as correct.