This semester there are over 600 international students attending UCA. Except for few of them who are from English-speaking countries, English is not the first language for most international students.

Electronic translators are often the solution for these students. They allow students to solve many difficulties of understanding in an easy and fast way.

However, along with it, comes the ethical question of whether students should be allowed to use their translators on tests.

Dwayne Coleman, assistant professor of English, is one professor who does not allow the use of translators on tests.

“The problem is really a matter of equality,” Coleman said “I don’t allow my students to use electronic translators during tests. For students who don’t need translators, they may often bring up ‘Well, they have translators. They have unfair advantages,’ something like that. To me, there is just something unfair going on to have students using translators in tests.”

Some students think the same way as Coleman.

Cater Wang, a student from China, said “I have been here over three years, I have not used my translator in a test for, maybe, the last five semesters. I used it when I was a freshman. The reason why I stopped using it was that I felt guilty every time I tried to use it. Nobody in class would treat you as a guy who is using translator to translate the language. They’d treat you as a guy who is using some kind of electronic device to cheat. I could tell that from the way they looked at me.”

Unfairness is also felt by international students as not all of them have translators.

“It made me feel bad to take a test with somebody who used a translator, because I didn’t have one,” Maggie Li, a freshman from China, said. “We international students all have difficulty understanding, it’s not fair that somebody can get help, somebody can’t during a same test. That’s why I had to get one myself.”

On the other hand, as the population of international students has grown, more people have been exposed to electronic translators.

Trace Thurman, a senior who studied abroad in China for one year, has a positive attitude on this issue.

“I totally understand the difficulty they are facing, that’s what I have had too. That’s not an unfair advantage at all. On the contrary, using a translator is what makes it fair. Because being in English-speaking country, not speaking perfect English is already an unfair disadvantage,” he said.

While translators have become more acceptable, it becomes a serious issue when people found out these technical tools can do much more than translate. They can be used to cheat.

Matt Gao, a student from China, said: “Nobody would accept phones during a test, but they may not know that a translator probably can do a greater job than a phone does on cheating.”

He said: “Information can be easily and quickly put into this little tool. Notes, slides, books, any kind of file related to the test can be converted and transferred into the translator. All you need to do whenever you want to look at the files is to turn it on and read the files pretending you are using the dictionary function.”

Some teachers have noticed this and don’t allow translators during tests.

Wendy Castro, assistant professor of History, is one of those professors.

“It’s all about technology,” Castro said. “It has gotten so much better. A couple years ago, all the translator would do was just translating words. That’s all it could do. So I don’t think anybody cared.”

Castro, who is a member of Academic Integrity and Discipline Committee, added: “It’s like bring in a paper dictionary to a test to help you to understand questions better. You can’t cheat just by looking up the word, right? So the concern has been with some of the new translators, which you can actually save text on it. If you bring a translator with whatever you saved on it, it’s not different from bringing your notes to tests.”

“That will be cheating,” Jonathan Glenn, associate provost and also a member of Academic Integrity and Discipline Committee, said. “If I store notes, I put this little button over here, and I can read the notes on the screen. No question. That will be cheating. That is a violation of academic integrity.”

Glenn said: “To be master at English is what you want to achieve, I bet you learn it faster if you know you don’t have this aid available.”

“It’s useful for right now, but it won’t be useful forever,” John Parrack, assistant professor of World Language Literature and Culture and a member of Academic Integrity and Discipline Committee, said.