Lynne Bowker: Machine Translation Literacy for the Scholarly Community
Channel: Anthony Pym
Date: 2019-10-24

Professor Lynne Bowker (Univerity of Ottawa) speaking at the University of Melbourne on October 23, 2019

Machine translation technology continues to advance, and the recent paradigm shift which saw the incorporation of artificial intelligence-based machine learning techniques – an approach referred to as Neural Machine Translation (NMT) – has been accompanied by an increased interest in incorporating this technology into the workflow of professional translators, but also into other spheres of activity, where translation is required but engaging professional translators is not always an option. In this paper, we will explore the emerging concept of “machine translation literacy” – the idea that users of machine translation need to develop a critical approach to this technology in order to decide whether, when, why and how to use it in an informed way. In particular, we will explore the use of machine translation by non-Anglophone researchers seeking to employ this technology in a scholarly communication context.

Lynne Bowker is Full Professor at the University of Ottawa (Canada) where she holds a cross-appointment between the School of Translation and Interpretation and the School of Information Studies. For 2019, she is the Researcher-in-Residence in the Library at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where she is developing and delivering a training program in Machine Translation Literacy for students and faculty. Her main research interests include translation technologies, corpus linguistics, terminology and language for special purposes. She is the author of Computer-Aided Translation Technology (2002, University of Ottawa Press), Working with Specialized Language (2002, Routledge) with Jennifer Pearson, and most recently Machine Translation and Global Research (2019, Emerald) with Jairo Buitrago Ciro.