@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-prompt-engineering,
    title = "Prompt engineering in translation: How do student translators leverage {G}en{AI} tools for translation tasks",
    author = "Zhang, Jia  and
      Zhao, Xiaoyu  and
      Doherty, Stephen",
    editor = "Bouillon, Pierrette  and
      Gerlach, Johanna  and
      Girletti, Sabrina  and
      Volkart, Lise  and
      Rubino, Raphael  and
      Sennrich, Rico  and
      Farinha, Ana C.  and
      Gaido, Marco  and
      Daems, Joke  and
      Kenny, Dorothy  and
      Moniz, Helena  and
      Szoc, Sara",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-1.33/",
    pages = "420--431",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-0-1",
    abstract = "GenAI, though not developed specifically for translation, has shown the potential to produce translations as good as, if not better than, contemporary neural machine translation systems. In the context of tertiary-level translator education, the integration of GenAI has renewed debate in curricula and pedagogy. Despite divergent opinions among educators, it is evident that translation students, like many other students, are using GenAI tools to facilitate translation tasks as they use MT tools. We thus argue for the benefits of guiding students in using GenAI in an informed, critical, and ethical manner. To provide insights for tailored curriculum and pedagogy, it is insightful to investigate what students use GenAI for and how they use it. This study is among the first to investigate translation students' prompting behaviours. For thematic and discourse analysis, we collected prompts in GenAI tools generated by a representative sample of postgraduate student participants for eight months. The findings revealed that students had indeed used GenAI in various translation tasks, but their prompting behaviours were intuitive and uninformed. Our findings suggest an urgent need for translation educators to consider students' agency and critical engagement with GenAI tools."
}