Free Online Machine Translation as a New Form of Cheating in Foreign Language Written Production

The Internet has inevitably led to new forms of plagiarism and cheating in foreign language written production such as copying text from the Web, from an essay mill or from a free online Machine Translation (MT) system's output and passing it as one's own. This article outlines the distinction between plagiarism as cheating and plagiarism as inadvertent “borrowing” presented by McGowan (2002) and focuses on free online MT as a new form of cheating in the language class. For this purpose, some suggestions as to how to tackle it are put forward together with some recommendations which will hopefully help to raise awareness of this growing problem in the language learning community.