Community interpreting, translation, and technology

Abstract

The focus of ETHI-CA2 spans ethical aspects around the entire processing pipeline from speech and language, as well as multimodal resource collection and annotation, to system development and application. In the recent time of ever-more collection "in the wild" of individual and personal multimodal and multi-sensorial "Big Data", crowd-sourced annotation by large groups of individuals with often unknown reliability and high subjectivity, and "deep" and autonomous learning with limited transparency of what is being learnt, and how applications such as in health or robotics depending on such data may behave, ethics have become more crucial than ever in the field of language and multimodal resources. This makes ethics a key concern of the LREC community. There is, however, a surprising if not shocking white spot in the landscape of workshops, special session, or journal special issues in this field, which ETHI-CA2 aims to fill in. The goal is thus to connect individuals ranging across LREC's fields of interest such as humanmachine and robot-and computer-mediated human-human interaction and communication, affective, behavioral, and social computing whose work touches on crucial ethical issues (e.g. privacy, traceability, explainability, evaluation, responsibility, etc.). According systems increasingly interact with and exploit data from humans of all ranges (e.g. children, adults, vulnerable populations) including non-verbal and verbal data occurring in a variety of real-life contexts (e.g. at home, the hospital, on the phone, in the car, classroom, or public transportation) and act as assistive and partially instructive technologies, companions, and/or commercial or even decision-making systems. Obviously, an immense responsibility lies at the different ends from data recording, labeling, and storage, to its processing and usage. Motivation Emerging interactive systems have changed the way we connect with our machines, modifying how we socialize, our reasoning capabilities, and our behavior. These areas inspire critical questions centering on the ethics, the goals, and the deployment of innovative products that can change our lives and society. Many current systems operate on private user data, including identifiable information, or data that provides insight into an individual's life routine. The workshop will provide discussions about user consent and the notion of informed data collection. Cloud-based storage systems have grown in popularity as the scope of user-content and usergenerated content has greatly increased in size. The workshop will provide discussions on best practices for data annotation and storage and evolving views on data ownership. Systems have become increasingly capable of mimicking human behavior through research in affective computing. These systems have provided demonstrated utility, for interactions with vulnerable populations (e.g. the elderly, children with autism). The workshop will provide discussions on considerations for vulnerable populations. The common mantra for assistive technol...

Are interpreters and interpreting technology ready for the post-Covid era?

“…The chapter called "Mapping the Field" (Napier, Skinner and Braun 2018: 11-35) reflects extensively on cognitive pressure, and strategies in interpreting via video link, both for spoken and signed language. Of course, the need for more research (not only replication research to substantiate findings but also more interdisciplinary research) can be linked to the already mentioned backlog in professionalisation, as confirmed once again by Mellinger and Pokorn (2018) in their introduction to the special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies when referring to the then innovative The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology (Chan 2015): "Compared to the extensive body of research in the field of translation, research on the intersection of community interpreting and technology is still in its initial stages" (Mellinger and Pokorn 2018: 337). Let this be a call to all interpreting scholars to not simply stress the need of research in this area, but to do it!…”

Perceptions of Computer-assisted Interpreting Tools in Interpreter Education in China’s Mainland: Preliminary Findings of a Survey

“…Furthermore, the existing scholarly discussion on this subject primarily emphasizes CAI tools prior to interpreting and tools for consecutive interpreting. This work aims to portrait CAI tools in interpreter education in China, echoing the western researchers' appeal (e.g., Irabien, 2010;Fantinuoli, 2018;Mellinger & Pokorn, 2018) to replicate the previous studies in different regions with different language combinations, thus complementing the bigger picture of CAI tools used in educational settings in the world. measure in any way the use of CAI tools in the profession or in pedagogy, but rather to provide statistical information for both fields and may eventually better align teaching objectives with the demand for future interpreters.…”

“…Over the last decade, increased attention has been paid to new technologies with new capabilities that have been developed in China, albeit accompanied by rash commercial fanfare 1 , which is seldom attempted in the western world. Following on the appeal of previous literature (e.g., Fantinuoli, 2018;Mellinger & Pokorn, 2018) to replicate or further the investigation of CAI tools in practice and interpreter education, this report, out of a series of related studies, presents an analysis of the perceptions of CAI tools in interpreter education from an online survey of student interpreters, professional interpreters, and interpreter trainers. It is hoped that the findings of this study will serve to profile the demand for CAI tools in China's interpreter education and help speed up integrating CAI in interpreter education.…”