Critical language barriers: Understanding the role of online translation tools in high-stakes professional sectors

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Online machine translation tools like Google Translate are widely available and hugely popular. These tools are also socially and ethically complex. On the one hand, they support linguistic diversity and increase access to information. On the other, these tools can be inaccurate, so they are inherently risky. The low cost and convenience of this technology are nevertheless highly appealing, so machine translation is now present even in high-stakes contexts. Official reports show that these tools are used to interview refugees, to communicate with patients, and to obtain consent for police searches. The possible negative consequences of using the technology in these situations can vary from information security threats to malpractice or miscarriages of justice. Most human-centred machine translation research to date has overlooked these potentially serious implications and tended to focus on how the technology is used in language services or in academic settings. This project will help to address a growing need for research focused on situations where non-linguists and non-students use machine translation to overcome a language barrier. The project's aim is to improve the understanding of machine translation's social implications in high-stakes professional sectors with a view to shaping guidance and public policy. Machine translation use will be situated in the context of broader theoretical traditions involving intercultural digital ethics, technological mediation, and the social construction of technology. The project will draw on relevant concepts from these frameworks and address two empirical questions. The first question will explore how professionals who work in high-stakes environments characterise machine translation and its use. Lawyers, doctors, police officers, civil servants and a range of other professionals will provide important accounts of how they deal with language barriers in their work and of what they see as the challenges and opportunities of machine translation. The second question will examine the implications of machine translation use for synchronous (i.e., live) ethically charged conversations. It will explore multimodal methods of interacting with the technology (e.g., with speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversions) and their effects on the communication and the interlocutors. The analysis will interrogate how machine translation can change the understanding of translation (written) and interpreting (spoken) and explore points of convergence between these two fields. The methods include both quantitative and qualitative techniques, and will break new ground in translation studies in terms of sampling strategy and research design. The UK's Chartered Institute of Linguists is a Partner on the project. A Royal Charter body of over 7,000 members, the Chartered Institute of Linguists will act as the incoming secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages. Its mission is to promote the value of languages and language skills in the public interest. Our partnership will play an important role in achieving the project's aim. Together, we will work to co-produce outputs and communicate the project's results to policy making and influencing bodies including Parliament, think tanks, government agencies, and trade unions. The project's outputs include open datasets, a policy advisory report as well as a book on ethical implications of machine translation beyond use-case settings in education and the language industry.Machine translation is a tool with significant potential. Our intention with the project is ultimately to help this potential to be realised in ways that enrich cross-cultural communication, promote social justice, and protect individuals' right to information, which all require an evidence-based understanding of the role this technology plays in society.