This paper is the one of the first in-depth accounts of the use of machine translation (MT) by journalists. It reports on a study of Finnish journalists that was conducted mostly in 2024 and comprised an online survey with 68 responses and interviews with 10 journalists. Results revealed that participants fluently integrated MT into a variety of journalistic processes, with an emphasis on using it for assimilation and dissemination; that they relied largely on traditional online MT tools and tended to employ MT mostly with languages they have some competence in; and that they had some awareness of risk and strategies for mitigating it, but could benefit from guidelines and training on working with MT. The article contributes to research on the users and contexts for MT and, specifically, to its paraprofessional use in workplaces.

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. As a tool both for accessing information across language barriers and for producing multilingual information, machine translation also plays a potential role in supporting these epistemic capacities. In this paper, we present an overview of DECA’s research on two perspectives: 1) how migrants use machine translation to access information, and 2) how journalists use machine translation in their work.

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.