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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Call the Grammar Police

  • from Part I - Communicating in English
  • Vered Shwartz, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    Lost in Automatic Translation
    Published online:
    08 October 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025, pp 22-36

  • Summary

    After acquiring sufficient vocabulary in a foreign language, learners start understanding parts of conversations in that language. Speaking, in contrast, is a harder task. Forming grammatical sentences requires choosing the right tenses and following syntax rules. Every beginner EFL speaker makes grammar errors – and the type of grammar errors can reveal hints about their native language. For instance, Russian speakers tend to omit the determiner “the” because Russian doesn’t use such modifying words. One linguistic phenomenon that is actually easier in English than in many other languages is grammatical gender. English doesn’t assign gender to inanimate nouns such as “table” or “cup.” A few years ago, the differences in grammatical gender between languages helped reveal societal gender bias in automatic translation: translation systems that were shown gender-neutral statements in Turkish about doctors and nurses assumed that the doctor was male while the nurse was female.