The DECA project consortium investigates epistemic capacities, defined as an individual’s access to reliable knowledge, their ability to participate in knowledge production, and society’s capacity to make informed, sustainable policy decisions. In this paper, we focus specifically on the parts of the project examining the challenges posed by multilinguality in these processes and the potential role of MT in supporting access to, and production of, knowledge.

This study analyzes usage statistics and the results of an end-user survey to compile a snapshot of the current use and users of one online machine translation (MT) tool, Multilizer’s PDF Translator1. The results reveal that the tool is used predominantly for assimilation purposes and that respondents use MT often. People use the tool to translate texts from different areas of life, including work, study and leisure. Of these, the study area is currently the most prevalent. The results also reveal a tendency for users to machine translate documents that are in languages they have some understanding of, rather than texts they do not understand at all. The findings imply that gist MT is becoming a part of people’s everyday lives and that perhaps people use gist MT in a different way than they use publishing-level translations.