The research area Translation, ethics and digital transformation takes a critical look at the historical dimensions and socio-political significance of language and translation technologies. We examine various phenomena of digital translation from a socio-cultural and empirical perspectives, focusing on their ethical, ideological, (geo)political, social, economic and media entanglements.
The focus is on the relationship between translation technologies and society as well as multimodal and cooperative forms of transcultural communication. These include translation technologies such as machine translation and interpreting, automatic speech recognition and synthetic speech output, multilingual chatbots, intelligent language assistants, photo-based translation apps and sign language avatars. Of particular interest in this context are pedagogical and didactic questions regarding the education and training of translators and interpreters as well as the individual and social impact of AI-based multilingual language and translation technologies.
The focus is on the relationship between translation technologies and society as well as multimodal and cooperative forms of transcultural communication. These include translation technologies such as machine translation and interpreting, automatic speech recognition and synthetic speech output, multilingual chatbots, intelligent language assistants, photo-based translation apps and sign language avatars. Of particular interest in this context are pedagogical and didactic questions regarding the education and training of translators and interpreters as well as the individual and social impact of AI-based multilingual language and translation technologies.
Our research focuses on the following questions:
- How are perceptions of and approaches to translation evolving in the face of the rapidly increasing mechanisation and automation of translation processes?
- What impacts does the rapidly increasing use of machine translation have on the working methods, economic conditions and status of professional translators?
- To what extent does the output of machine translation systems reflect social stereotypes (e.g. gender) and how can translation technologies be designed to be more inclusive?
- How must Translation Studies institutes transform themselves against the backdrop of digitalization in order to be able to offer students a modern, sustainable and critical education in the future?