#103 The Machine Translation Literacy Project with Lynne Bowker

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Lynne Bowker, Professor at the University of Ottawa to discuss the Machine Translation Literacy Project, whose eye-catching infographics have proven very popular on Twitter.

Lynne shares her background working in higher education and how this led to her running the MT Literacy Project. She talks about the evolution of machine translation (MT) systems and how this inspired her to teach users in the wider population about the dos and don'ts of using MT output.

Lynne talks about the different use cases of free online MT systems, highlighting her research on how international students use MT as an aid for scholarly writing in English. She mentions the importance of confidentiality and privacy when using programs such as DeepL and Google Translate.

The pod rounds off with Lynne’s plans to train teachers in MT Literacy and introduce the project to thousands of secondary school students as part of enhancing their digital literacy skills.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect becoming the first language service provider (LSP) to report annual revenues of over USD 1bn. Another company to clear the billionaire-dollar mark was Iyuno-SDI, as the media localization provider was valued at USD 1.2bn in its latest round of investment.

Over in Europe, the “Irish derogation” has ended — meaning that every piece of EU legislation must be published in Irish. Florian talks about a mistranslation by the Scottish Government that saw “Happy Burns Night” being mistaken for “heat burns” in Scottish Gaelic.

Meanwhile, Esther covers Straker Translations’ Q3 FY22 financial update, with the LSP recording a 99% increase from the Q3 FY21 and a 26% increase from Q2 FY22.