Dear All,

Please see our Call for Papers below.

Best wishes,
Joss

*** Fair MT: Building ethical and sustainable MT workflows ***

SPECIAL ISSUE OF TRANSLATION SPACES
Vol. 9(1) July 2020

Edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo

Since the well-publicised advent of neural MT, many more language service
providers have begun to offer raw and post-edited MT as a reduced-cost
option among their suite of products (Lommel and DePalma 2016). The level
of automation in translation is usually related to the perishability of the
text, along with considerations of regulatory compliance and risk, but new
use cases are regularly appearing for NMT where automation might previously
have been considered unwise (Moorkens 2017, Way 2018).

Meanwhile, research on MT has tended to focus on building systems to
maximise the quality of output, evaluating that output in a cost-effective
way, along with various forms of pre- and post-processing of texts. There
has been little focus on the sort of workflows that these MT systems would
be built into outside of experimental conditions, and where these workflows
have been considered, the focus has been on efficiency and utility (Plitt
and Masselot 2010, O’Brien 2011).

Likewise, the origin and ownership of training data have received scant
attention. At present, claims and counterclaims for copyright of
translations all have legal merit without having been tested, yet they are
largely ignored within the translation industry (Troussel and Debussche
2014). These conflicting claims could have an anticommons effect, in which
there are so many competing claims on a resource that it becomes impossible
to use or exploit it. Work created by a machine does not currently qualify
for copyright, meaning that the copyright – and liability – lies with the
operator. This risk is rarely considered in MT use. When repurposing and
retasking human translations and translation fragments, the industry is
also avoiding a discussion on the ethical dimensions of data management,
including consent for secondary use, copyright management, and data
ownership – issues that affect not just vendors but also clients.

And where the original motivation for MT was utopian, the main driver is
now the pressure to reduce human costs. If translation is reduced to a
series of “language-replacement exercises” (Pym 2003) to be carried out at
speed by freelance workers while their productivity rate is quantified
within a translation tool, there is a real risk that talent will be
discouraged (Abdallah 2014). How do we train students to enter such an
industry – or should we even do so? And does the very existence of machine
translation undermine efforts to train translators or – more broadly – to
educate language learners, in the first place?

At this point, we think it worth looking at the ethics of MT use in
industry and the economic and social effects on all stakeholders.

With these issues in mind, we would like to invite submissions that respond
to the following and related questions:

• What would an ethical MT supply chain look like?
• How can translation data be used efficiently, but in a way that respects
the rights of all agents in the supply chain?
• How has our approach to risk evolved in the context of machine
translation?
• What role is played by technology in supporting the business models that
are reshaping this chain?
• What real effect do mergers and acquisitions create on the sustainability
of translation as an industry and for the people that live in it?
• How can we guarantee the safety of our products for consumers, while
maximising the social quality (Abdallah 2014) of all workers in the
industry?
• How can we continue to attract and retain human talent in the translation
industry?
• What can academics and translator trainers do to make a positive impact
on the use of automation in the translation industry?

INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words long and should follow the
journal's house style. Full instructions for authors can be found at
http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ts/guidelines.
Articles are to be submitted via Editorial Manager at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/ts, choosing the option for this special
issue.

Please send any enquiries to joss.moork...@dcu.ie with the subject line
‘Translation Spaces’.

SCHEDULE
• October 15th 2019 - deadline submission of full articles for peer review
• December 18th 2019 - feedback from peer-review to authors
• January 20th 2020 – deadline for submission of authors’ revised articles
• January 24th 2020 – feedback from guest editors on revised articles
• January 29th 2020 – deadline for submission of final version
• March 25th 2020 – proofs sent to authors
• July 2020 – publication

REFERENCES
Abdallah, K. (2014). Social Quality: Key to Collective Problem Solving in
Translation Production Networks, in G. Ločmele and A. Veisbergs (eds)
Translation, Quality, Costs. Riga: University of Latvia Press, 5–18.
Lommel, A., DePalma, D. A. (2016). Europe’s Leading Role in Machine
Translation: How Europe Is Driving the Shift to MT. Boston: Common Sense
Advisory.
Moorkens, J. (2017). Under pressure: translation in times of austerity,
Perspectives, 25:3, 464-477
O’Brien, S. (2011). Towards predicting post-editing productivity. Machine
Translation 25, 197.
Plitt, M. and Masselot, F. (2010). A productivity test of statistical
machine translation post-editing in a typical localisation context. Prague
Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics
Pym, A. (2003). Translational ethics and electronic technologies. Paper
presented at the VI Seminário de Tradução Científica e Técnica em Língua
Portuguesa A Profissionalização do Tradutor.
Way, A. (2018). Quality Expectations of Machine Translation, in J.
Moorkens, S. Castilho, F. Gaspari and S. Doherty (eds) Translation Quality
Assessment, Cham: Springer, 159–178.

-- 
*Joss Moorkens* | Assistant Professor

School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies
Researcher at the ADAPT Centre (link <http://www.adaptcentre.ie>)
Centre for Translation and Textual Studies (link <https://ctts.ie/>)
Room C2116, Dublin City University, Ireland

p: +353 (0) 1 700 7477
e: joss.moork...@dcu.ie

New book: Moorkens, Castilho, Doherty, Gaspari (Eds) Translation Quality
Assessment: From Principles to Practice
<https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319912400>. Springer.

Latest article: Teixeira, Moorkens, Turner, Vreeke, Way 2019. Creating a
Multimodal Translation Tool and Testing Machine Translation Integration
Using Touch and Voice
<https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.1075%25252Fts.18014.moo/author>.
Informatics 6:1, 13.

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