Machine translation as support for epistemic capacities: Findings from the DECA project (2025)

Abstract: The DECA project consortium investigates epistemic capacities, defined as an individual’s access to reliable knowledge, their ability to participate in knowledge production, and society’s capacity to make informed, sustainable policy decisions. As a tool both for accessing information across language barriers and for producing multilingual information, machine translation also plays a potential role in supporting these epistemic capacities. In this paper, we present an overview of DECA’s research on two perspectives: 1) how migrants use machine translation to access information, and 2) how journalists use machine translation in their work.

## introduction the ability to access relevant, reliable knowledge and information is an essential part of epistemic capacity @xcite . from the perspective of individuals, equal availability and accessibility of information can be seen as a fundamental epistemic right @xcite . while modern societies are increasingly multilingual, information produced by societal institutions like public administration and media is generally limited to dominant local languages and to a lesser extent some lingua franca (e.g. english). information is therefore not equally accessible and intelligible to all members of society. questions of epistemic capacities and epistemic rights are at the core of the research carried out by the project consortium democratic epistemic capacity in the age of algorithms ## mt for linguistic accessibility mt is an important tool for migrants, particularly vulnerable migrants like refugees and asylum seekers @xcite . deca has aimed to investigate in more detail how migrants who do not speak finnish use mt to find, access and use information about finnish society. we have focused on people who have arrived in finland from ukraine or russia since 2022. data collection started in spring 2024 with focus group discussions (@xmath0, information sources and linguistic barriers they encounter. participants were then invited for individual interviews (@xmath1. the experiment consisted of tasks where the participants were asked to find information related to aspects of life in finland (e.g. library services, public transport). the purpose of the task was to observe their strategies for searching information and their use or mt. screen recordings and thinkaloud were recorded for analysis. a preliminary analysis shows that most participants attempted to find information in their first language (ukrainian or russian), which provided relatively little information. the most effective use of mt was first translating the search phrases into finnish to find relevant pages and then using mt to read these pages. however, this strategy was used by only a minority of the participants, mainly young adults who showed good information skills. a more detailed analysis of the interviews and tasks is currently ongoing. ## mt in journalism journalism plays a vital role in providing relevant societal information @xcite . while previous work has developed mt tools for use in journalism (e.g. @xcite , the perspective of journalists using mt remains relatively unexplored. deca has therefore aimed to investigate more closely the ways in which journalists in finland use mt in their work. the first stage of research starting in 2023 focused on journalists at the finnish national broadcasting company yle producing news in english, russian and ukrainian. we conducted interviews (@xmath2. findings from the interviews show that mt use varies in the different departments. the ukrainian news are mainly produced by translating finnish news, and the work relies on an mt tool provided by yle. in the other departments, mt use is less common, and the attitudes of journalists toward mt vary. benefits identified by the journalists include making their work faster and allowing them to access more diverse sources in different languages. on the other hand, they expressed some doubts related to the quality of mt and ethical aspects. in 2024, the work has been extended to mt use by journalists producing news in finnish. we conducted interviews (@xmath3, which was circulated to journalists working at finnish media houses. analysis of the data is currently ongoing. ## future work as next stage of the work, we aim to further investigate the use of mt in finnish public institutions, particularly immigration and integration services. a survey inspired by prior work carried out in the uk @xcite and discussions with stakeholders in the field is being planned for 2025. additionally, we are producing materials aimed at increasing mt literacy among different user groups, such as journalists, public administration or teachers, to be published in 2025.