Translators’ perspectives on machine translation uses and impacts in the Swiss Confederation: Navigating technological change in an institutional setting

Paolo Canavese, Patrick Cadwell


Abstract
New language technologies are driving major changes in the language services of institutions worldwide, including the Swiss Confederation. Based on a definition of change management as a combination of adaptation measures at both the organisation and individual levels, this study used a survey to gather unprecedented quantitative data on the use and qualitative data on the perceptions of machine translation (MT) by federal in-house translators. The results show that more than half of the respondents use MT regularly and that translators are largely free to use it as they see fit. In terms of perceptions, they mostly anticipate negative evolutions along five dimensions: work processes, translators, translated texts, the future of their language services and job, and the place of translators within their institution and society. Their apprehensions concern MT per se, but even more the way it is seen and used within their organisation. However, positive perspectives regarding efficiency gains or usefulness of MT as a translation aid were also discussed. Building on these human factors is key to successful change management. Academic research has a contribution to make, and the coming together of translation and organisation studies offers promising avenues for further research.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, UK
Editors:
Carolina Scarton, Charlotte Prescott, Chris Bayliss, Chris Oakley, Joanna Wright, Stuart Wrigley, Xingyi Song, Edward Gow-Smith, Rachel Bawden, Víctor M Sánchez-Cartagena, Patrick Cadwell, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Vera Cabarrão, Konstantinos Chatzitheodorou, Mary Nurminen, Diptesh Kanojia, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
347–359
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.30
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paolo Canavese and Patrick Cadwell. 2024. Translators’ perspectives on machine translation uses and impacts in the Swiss Confederation: Navigating technological change in an institutional setting. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 347–359, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Translators’ perspectives on machine translation uses and impacts in the Swiss Confederation: Navigating technological change in an institutional setting (Canavese & Cadwell, EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.30.pdf