Article published In:
Digital TranslationVol. 10:1 (2023) ► pp.16–36
The many guises of machine translation
A postphenomenology perspective
Machine translation (MT) tools are widely available. They may be present in different spaces in ways that consumers of the content do not necessarily control or realise, and research to date has paid little attention to these human-MT encounters. This article draws on the philosophy of technology literature to consider implications of MT’s permeating presence in online environments as well as in face-to-face interactions. The focus of the article is on two situations where humans can come across MT: while browsing websites and when speaking with figures of authority. The article highlights ways in which humans’ relationship with MT transcends conscious decisions to operate an MT tool directly. It argues that the human-MT relationship can also be one of immersion where MT blends with the environment in ways that, on the one hand, break language barriers but, on the other, influence, persuade, and on occasion misinform.
Keywords: machine translation, postphenomenology, MT-mediated communication, website translation, face-to-face interactions, human-technology relations
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Research on machine translation and society
- 3.Machine translation and human-technology relations
- 4.Website translation
- 5.Figures of authority and machine-translated interactions
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (62)
Adams, Douglas. 1979. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan.
Apple. 2022. “Translation & Privacy.” Apple. Accessed 19 July 2022. [URL]
Asscher, Omri, and Ella Glikson. 2021. “Human evaluations of machine translation in an ethically charged situation.” New Media & Society. 
Baig, Edward C. 2020. “Translate this: How Real-Time Translation Breaks down Barriers When You Don’t Speak the Language.” USA Today, 2020, Tech. Accessed 18 January 2022. [URL]
Berbyuk Lindström, Nataliya, and Cheryl Cordeiro. 2022. “‘Just Google Translate It!’ ICT Use of Migrant IT professionals for Mitigating Workplace Integration Challenges.” In AMCIS 2022 Proceedings. Association for Information Systems. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Bolt, David. 2020. An inspection of the Home Office’s use of language services in the asylum process. Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. Accessed 25 January 2022. [URL]
Bowker, Lynne. 2020. “Fit-for-purpose translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan, 453–468. London: Routledge.
Bowker, Lynne, and Jairo Buitrago Ciro. 2015. “Investigating the Usefulness of Machine Translation for Newcomers at the Public Library.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 10 (2): 165–186.
. 2019. Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.
Brauthaarschmuck. 2022. “Earrings Beads Jewelry earrings jewelery Wedding Bride Wedding Bridal Earrings Hoops [automatically machine-translated from German].” Etsy. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Buts, Jan. 2021. “Targeted individuals: Personalised advertising and digital media translation.” Translation Spaces.
Castilho, Sheila, Fabio Alves, Sharon O’Brien, and Morgan O’Brien. 2014. “Does Post-Editing Increase Usability? A study with Brazilian Portuguese as Target Language.” In Proceedings of the seventh annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, 183–190. European Association for Machine Translation.
City of North Vancouver. 2022. “City of North Vancouver Official Website.” City of North Vancouver. Accessed 26 May 2022. [URL]
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 2022. “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Website.” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
Di Cori, Arianna. 2022. “Il 118 non parla inglese, turista tedesca muore a 25 anni. Il compagno: ‘Mi facevano le domande con Google Translate’.” La Repubblica, 04 April 2022, 2022, Cronaca. Accessed 18 August 2022. [URL]
European Commission. n.d. “Eurostat: Your Key to European Statistics.” European Commission. Accessed 16 August 2022. [URL]
Extra. 2021. “Guardas municipais usam tradutor do Google para socorrer tailandesa abandonada pelo namorado ucraniano no Parque Madureira.” Extra. Last Modified 25 December 21. Accessed 19 July 2022. [URL]
Fan, Angela. 2020. “Introducing the First AI Model That Translates 100 Languages Without Relying on English.” Meta. Accessed 19 May. [URL]
Gaspari, Federico. 2007. “The Role of Online MT in Webpage Translation.” PhD Thesis, School of Informatics, University of Manchester. [URL]
Glikson, Ella and Omri Asscher. 2022. AI-mediated apology in a multilingual work context: Implications for perceived authenticity and willingness to forgive. Computers in Human Behavior, 107592.
Google. 2021. “Google Keynote (Google I/O ’21).” Google. Accessed 20 May 2022. [URL]
. 2022a. “Attribution Requirements.” Google. Last Modified 14 July 2022 UTC. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
. 2022b. “Change Chrome Languages and Translate Web Pages.” Google. Accessed 30 June 2022. [URL]
Greater London Authority. n.d. “Transport for London.” Greater London Authority. Accessed 16 August 2022. [URL]
Grosdidier, Pierre. 2019. “Lost in Translation: Google Translate Might Not Always Be the Best Way to Obtain Search Consent.” Texas Bar Journal 82 (2): 94.
Hendus, Ulrike. 2015. “‘See Translation’: Explicit and Implicit Language Policies on Facebook.” Language Policy 141: 397–417.
House, Juliane. 2014. “Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present. In Translation: a Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Juliane House, 241–264. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Iceland Monitor. 2017. “Interrogation via Google Translate.” Iceland Monitor. Last Modified Wed 16 Aug 2017. Accessed 19 July 2022. [URL]
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Jia, Yanfang, and Binghan Zheng. 2022. “The Interaction Effect between Source Text Complexity and Machine Translation Quality on the Task Difficulty of NMT Post-Editing from English to Chinese: A Multi-Method Study.” Across Languages and Cultures 23 (1): 36–55.
Jolley, Jason R., and Luciane Maimone. 2015. “Free Online Machine Translation: Use and Perceptions by Spanish Students and Instructors.” Learn Languages, Explore Cultures, Transform Lives: 181–200. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Kaplan, David M. 2009. “What Things Still Don’t Do.” Review of What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, Peter-Paul Verbeek. Human Studies 32 (2): 229–240. [URL]
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon lectures in management studies. Oxford: Clarendon.
Liubinienė, Vilmantė, Donata Lisaitė, and Jurgita Motiejūnienė. 2022. “A Snapshot of Children’s Attitudes toward Machine Translation.” Information 13 (7): 317. [URL]
Maryns, Katrijn, Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer, and Mieke Van Herreweghe. 2021. “Introduction: Flexible Multilingual Strategies in Asylum and Migration Encounters.” The Translator 27 (1): 1–11.
Microsoft. 2022. “Attribution.” Microsoft. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
New York State. n.d. “The Official Website of New York State.” Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Nurminen, Mary. 2019. “Decision-Making, Risk, and Gist Machine Translation in the Work of Patent Professionals.” In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Patent and Scientific Literature Translation, 32–42. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Nurminen, Mary, and Niko Papula. 2018. “Gist MT Users: A Snapshot of the Use and Users of One Online MT Tool.” In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, Alicant, Spain, May 2018, edited by Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Maja Popović, Celia Rico, André Martins, Joachim Van den Bogaert and Mikel L. Forcada, 199–208. European Association for Machine Translation.
Ogura, Kentaro, Yoshihiko Hayashi, Saeko Nomura, and Toru Ishida. 2004. “User Adaptation in MT-Mediated Communication.” In Proceedings of The First International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-04). Association for Computational Linguistics. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Olohan, Maeve. 2011. “Translators and Translation Technology: The Dance of Agency.” Translation Studies 4 (3): 342–357.
Pituxcoosuvarn, Mondheera, and Toru Ishida. 2018. “Multilingual Communication via Best-Balanced Machine Translation.” New Generation Computing 36 (4): 349–364.
Ramati, Ido, and Amit Pinchevski. 2018. “Uniform Multilingualism: A Media Genealogy of Google Translate.” New Media and Society 20 (7): 2550–2565.
Ritter, Martin. 2021. “Postphenomenological Method and Technological Things Themselves.” Human Studies 44 (4): 581–593.
Robertson, Samantha, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Daniel J. Liebling, Michal Lahav, Katherine Heller, Mark Díaz, Samy Bengio, and Niloufar Salehi. 2021. Three Directions for the Design of Human-Centered Machine Translation. Google (Google). Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Rosenberger, Robert, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. 2015. “A Field Guide to Postphenomenology.” Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, edited by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 9–41. Lexington Books.
State of Connecticut. 2022a. “Connecticut’s Official State Website.” State of Connecticut. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
. 2022b. “Disclaimer.” State of Connecticut. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
State of Oregon. 2022. “Oregon.gov.” State of Oregon. Accessed 18 July 2022. [URL]
Toral, Antonio, Martijn Wieling, and Andy Way. 2018. “Post-editing Effort of a Novel With Statistical and Neural Machine Translation.” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 5 (9).
USA v Cruz-Zamora. 2018. United States District Court for the District of Kansas. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2008. “Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the Phenomenology of Human–Technology Relations.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 387–395.
. 2009. “Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technology: The Blurring Boundaries Between Human and Technology.” Nanoethics 3 (3): 231–242.
. 2015. “Beyond Interaction.” Interactions. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
. 2016. “Toward a Theory of Technological Mediation: A Program for Postphenomenological Research.” In Technoscience and Postphenomenology: The Manhattan Papers, edited by Jan Kyrre Berg O. Friis and Robert P. Crease, 189–204. London: Lexington Books.
Vieira, Lucas Nunes, Minako O’Hagan, and Carol O’Sullivan. 2020. “Understanding the Societal Impacts of Machine Translation: A Critical Review of the Literature on Medical and Legal Use Cases.” Information, Communication & Society: 1–18.
Vieira, Lucas Nunes, Carol O’Sullivan, Xiaochun Zhang, and Minako O’Hagan. 2022a. “Machine Translation in Society: Insights from UK users.” Language Resources and Evaluation.
. 2022b. “Privacy and Everyday Users of Machine Translation.” Translation Spaces.
Vorstoffel, Annette. 2019. “Tips for Optimising your Shop’s Language Settings.” Etsy. Accessed 20 May 2022. [URL]
Wahlster, Wolfgang, ed. 2000. Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Yamada, Setsuo, Syuuji Kodama, Taeko Matsuoka, Hiroshi Araki, Yoshiaki Murakami, Osamu Takano, and Yoshiyuki Sakamoto. 2005. “A Report on the Machine Translation Market in Japan.” The 10th Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, Thailand. Accessed 01 October 2022. [URL]
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.