Reaching multilingual communities: a survey mapping MT use in the West Midlands (UK) third and public sector organisations

David Orrego-Carmona, Priyanki Ghosh, Susana Valdez


Abstract
Machine Translation (MT) has become a default language access tool in public and third sector organisations serving multilingual communities. However, how organisations, and their staff, actually use it, and their opinions about it, remain largely undocumented. This paper reports findings from charities, NGOs, community organisations and local government authorities in the West Midlands (UK), one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the country. The results indicate that MT use is widespread, informal, and driven by necessity rather than informed decisions or policies. Google Translate is the preferred tool; policies about MT use are rare, and confidence in translation quality is limited. Risk perception varies across the sector: local government respondents identify the widest range of concerns, including legal and medical, while third-sector organisations suggest a pragmatic approach. However, greater risk-awareness does not lead to greater governance, pointing to a gap between individual MT literacy and institutional accountability. Based on this, we propose some recommendations for how organisation serving multilingual communities should approach MT implementation and training.
Anthology ID:
2026.eamt-1.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Editors:
Dimitar Shterionov, Eva Vanmassenhove, Mirella De Sisto, Fred Blain, Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Lisa Lepp, Chiara Manna, Argentina Anna Rescigno, Alina Karakanta, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Manuel Lardelli, Natalia Resende, Elena Murgolo, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Anna Zaretskaya, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Dagmar Gromann, Rachel Bawden, Barry Haddow, Sara Szoc, Mikel Forcada, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
608–619
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.38/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Orrego-Carmona, Priyanki Ghosh, and Susana Valdez. 2026. Reaching multilingual communities: a survey mapping MT use in the West Midlands (UK) third and public sector organisations. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 608–619, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Reaching multilingual communities: a survey mapping MT use in the West Midlands (UK) third and public sector organisations (Orrego-Carmona et al., EAMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.38.pdf