Recently, Japanese language students from the College of Foreign Languages successfully completed a Japanese graphic OCR project from Shanghai IFLYTEK Co. The project was conducted online and was divided into proofreading and checking sessions. The Japanese language students completed the proofreading and checking of 42,790 images, and passed the acceptance of the company, successfully completing the project.
The project was launched in November last year, and more than 100 students from four years of the Japanese Department signed up for the project because it was highly relevant to the students' majors. IFLYTEK has strict specifications for text proofreading, and the acceptance rate is required to reach 98% or more. There were some graphics with low clarity, illegible, or particularly dense text, which particularly tested the students' patience and persistence. In the initial stage, there were cases where the acceptance of individual batches was lower than the requirement, but the quality improved significantly after slowly becoming proficient. Because of the large number of pictures and the long time span of the project, there was a period of time when the progress was slowed down because of the conflict with the final examination and the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, etc. The Japanese Department promptly supervised and reminded the students. In the middle, we also encountered the epidemic and online classes, but the students also overcame the difficulties and finally completed the proofreading and checking of 42,790 pictures with quality and quantity.
As the organizer and manager of the project, the Japanese Department tracked and managed all aspects of the project, including initiation, implementation and acceptance, established a work plan and actual schedule, and provided timely reminders when problems were found. We also maintained close contact with the company to keep track of the progress of the project, and finally completed this school-enterprise cooperation project successfully.
Through nearly half a year of practice, the students experienced first-hand the use of technology in foreign languages and had a more intuitive feeling of the process of machine translation development. During the proofreading and checking process, students also improved their Japanese language to a greater extent, increasing their vocabulary, familiarizing themselves with Japanese expressions, as well as being exposed to various authentic Japanese usage scenarios and improving their Japanese language skills. Some of the younger students gave feedback that they were much more proficient now, from the beginning when they had to spend a lot of time checking the dictionary to confirm the pronunciation because of their low vocabulary mastery. Many students worked very hard and the number of markers was as high as 2,249 and the number of checkers was the highest at 9,027, and they also maintained a very high rate of correctness. At the end, 28 students received internship certificates from IFLYTEK for their excellent performance in the number of annotations, checks and correctness rate. The Japanese Department also distributed the reserved management fee as a reward to the students who performed well.
(Reported by the College of Foreign Languages office; Translated by Li Huixian)
