Translator autonomy in the age of behavioural data

Abstract

Translation behaviour is increasingly tracked to benchmark productivity, to calculate pay or to automate project management decisions. Although in many cases these practices are commonplace, their effects are surprisingly under-researched. This article investigates the consequences of activity tracking in commercial translation. It reports on a series of focus-group interviews involving sixteen translators who used productivity tools to independently monitor their work for a period of sixteen weeks. Our analysis revealed several ways in which the act of tracking activity can itself influence translators’ working practices. We examine translators’ conceptualisations of productivity and discuss the findings as a matter of translator autonomy. The article calls for further awareness of individual and collective consequences of monitoring translation behaviour. Although in some contexts translators found activity tracking to be useful, we argue that client-controlled tracking and translator autonomy are in most cases incompatible.

Concurrent translation on collaborative platforms

“…Moorkens (2020a, 12) suggests that translators working in the crowdsourcing paradigm translate "decontextualized strings of text anonymously via an online platform in return for a micropayment", whilst García (2015, 29), referring to collaborative translation technologies as cloud marketplaces, draws attention to the fact that "the very features that make [them] client-friendly create more demanding conditions for workers", and that "the potential of cloud computing for social good is enormous, but so is its potential for surveillance and exploitation" (García 2017, 68). Similar concerns regarding translators' agency, autonomy and privacy are voiced by Vieira et al (2021) who regard the tracking and analysis of translators' behavioural data in the form of "real-time reporting" (TAUS 2020) as unethical practices in which "algorithms [which] are used to triage commissions and to profile translators based on how fast they work […] can have consequences for pay and the likelihood of receiving work in the future" (Vieira et al 2021, 128).…”

Translating science fiction in a CAT tool: machine translation and segmentation settings

“…The data collection process translators' autonomy over their data. Commercial uses of the plugin are outside the scope of this article, but we argue that in any such case translators should be the judges of whether and how their activity is recorded and actively consent to any sharing of it (see Vieira et al, 2021).…”