Ethical Considerations for Machine Translation of Indigenous Languages: Giving a Voice to the Speakers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Relatively Ethical: A Comparison of Linguistic Research Paradigms in Alaska and Indonesia
Just as there is no single model for community-based research, ethical standards for community engagement are not universal. Drawing from personal experiences with language documentation among threatened communities in two very different parts of the world, this paper examines the challenges of applying universal ethical guidelines for linguistic fieldwork.
Ethical principles in linguistic fieldwork methodologies-According to whom
LD&C, 2021
This article seeks to establish a dialogue between the methodological proposals that have been put forward for linguistic fieldwork and the growing experiences of Indigenous linguists. It is well known that the theorizing of the methodologies that dictate linguists' interactions in their communities of study is carried out from a perspective foreign to both the language and the community. These methodologies are designed for and guided by non-Indigenous academics, predominantly academics from different countries than those of the language and its speakers. This paper argues that the challenges faced by insider and insider-outsider linguists are not the same challenges as those faced by outsider linguists. Thus, this article contributes to a reevaluation of the universality of ethical methodological principles of fieldwork behavior in contemporary linguistics and promotes a local, Indigenous perspective that implies the decolonization of fieldwork methodologies designed by and for foreigners and uncritically adopted by insider and insider-outsider linguists.
Human evaluations of machine translation in an ethically charged situation
New Media & Society, 2021
Despite the immense influence of machine translation (MT) on cross-cultural communication worldwide, little is known about end users' predispositions toward MT. Our online experiment (N = 284) compares people's perceptions of MT and human translation in an ethically charged situation, in which the translation serves an immigrant worker in an interaction defined by power imbalance. Using hierarchical linear regression, we found that an otherwise identical translation was evaluated differently when it was attributed to MT or human translation. Results reveal that translators and non-translators alike exhibit a negative bias toward the MT product when asked to assess its accuracy and reliability, its ability to convey cultural and emotional otherness, and its potential effectiveness in helping the disadvantaged immigrant in need of the translation. We also demonstrate how lower evaluations of the MT product lead to a stronger wish to intervene in the translation by introducing changes to the original message. Our results suggest that predispositions toward MT must be taken into account in any consideration of MT-mediated communication, as these predispositions may shape the communicative act itself. Keywords Human perceptions of MT, lay use of MT, machine translation (MT), MT and cross-cultural communication, MT in ethically charged communication, social implications of MT
Translating rights: the Peruvian Indigenous Languages Act in Quechua and Aymara 1
New language rights legislation in Peru has triggered State training of indigenous translator-interpreters to work in public service and prior consultation settings. A spin-off of the training has been the translation of the text of the 2011 Indigenous Languages Act from Spanish into a range of indigenous languages. This article focuses on the challenges of the translating process to Quechua and Aymara. These challenges were presented by the structural differences between source and target languages, the divergent conceptual systems that embed the original text and its translations, and the different trade-offs between orality and literacy of the cultural systems involved. Finally, issues concerning the relationship between the translators' cultural identities and the translation process arose; these are also addressed.
Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2022
This conceptual paper examines the relationship between two academic areas: applied linguistics and Indigenous language revitalization. While the two domains have shared interests, they tend to operate separately. This paper examines: 1) possible reasons for this separateness; 2) mutually beneficial reasons to be in closer conversation and 3) changes necessary for the creation of an ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007) between these academic areas. We write from distinct positions: Belinda, a nēhiyaw woman working in Indigenous language resurgence and Andrea, a white settler woman working in language issues related to settler-colonialism. Drawing from our joint and individual experiences, we explore how these research fields can complement each other as well as intersect to create richer interdisciplinary knowledge.
2020
This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the tra...