Mobile translation applications On the verge of a post-Babel world 2.0?

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What effects are mobile translation applications having on translation as an activity and translation studies? How is this affecting users' perceptions of translation? Is this another step in the trend of deskilling and devaluing translation into a low autonomy profession? (O'Hagan 2016, Kenny 2016) Are we on the cusp of a world where the language barrier is no more? The project will explore these questions by investigating the different types of machine translation (MT) used in the most popular of these apps, such as Google Translate and Microsoft Translator. It will then examine how users are actually engaging with these apps and their expectations through a survey and focus groups to discover whether they are enabling greater cross-cultural communication and changing our relationship with other languages and cultures. Finally, it will explore how the spread of 4G/5G mobile networks, offline translations and the increased use of mobile phones while roaming are allowing people to engage more with these apps and how translation studies is responding to this phenomenon.