Photo source: Speakers’ corner: The home of free speech. 15 May 2015. BBC News in Pictures

This section of the Teach You Backwards website will be populated with responses to the study findings from people with expertise relating to the topics at hand. I pledge to print (within reason), without revision, any thoughtful comments received from experts active in MT, linguistics, translation, AI, NLP, HLT, and other related fields. Every author cited in this study for whom I could find contact information has been invited to contribute commentary. I especially welcome the responses of people within the MT industry, particularly from Google. I have written directly to many members of the Google Translate team, and look forward to publishing their unredacted thoughts, and/or an official comment by the corporation.

I would prefer to publish comments with the name of the reviewer attached, but I will post reviews anonymously if requested. (The usual purpose behind anonymous reviews is presumably to remove potential bias during the journal/ book/ conference submission process, which does not apply to this website.) It is my hope that openly publishing comments from external reviewers will prove more satisfying than the opacity normally governing peer review.

TYB is an evolving site. When I post interesting peer comments, I may respond directly to the reviewer on the page they submit, and their page will be open to reader reactions and to their own further comments. I also might respond to incoming commentary with additional notes directly in the main text; any such changes will be duly noted.

Readers who are not academic or industry “experts” are also encouraged to share your thoughts in the discussion boards that appear on the bottom of each page of the findings. I reserve the right to moderate comments for relevance.

Expert Commentary

• Andrew Innes – How to Use Google Translate in the Classroom
• Juan Carlos Dias Vasquez – TYB Commentary
• Michael Rundell – Observations