AI Technology Integration and Interpreting Practice in the Bilingual Video Project: Benefits and Challenges From Students’ Perspectives

With technological advancements, audiovisual translation (AVT) is increasingly crucial for enhancing students’ competencies. This study explores students’ perspectives on AI technology integration and interpreting practice in a multimedia project, i.e., producing a bilingual video (BV) in an interpreting course to practice AVT. The five-stage project involves clip selection, plot rewriting, dubbing, simultaneous interpreting, and subtitling with meaningful content and learning autonomy. It employs a mixed-methods approach, using a student questionnaire with both closed and open questions to investigate the perceived benefits and challenges in a BV project encountered by 54 third-year students of an English faculty in Vietnam. The findings indicate that the BV project can potentially enhance students’ competencies with several benefits for developing engagement and performance concerning interpreting skills, confidence, teamwork, cultural awareness, creativity, AI technology skills, hands-on experience with real-world interpreting scenarios, and peer assessment. However, students face challenges in clip selection, script writing, and technical aspects of content production related to linguistic, cultural, technical complexities, and technological issues. This paper contributes to the ongoing literature, offering valuable insights into effectively utilizing multimedia projects to diversify interpreting practice.