Everyday machine translation: Across digital and physical environments

This chapter provides an overview of key emerging themes in research that look at machine translation (MT) as an everyday communication tool. The chapter considers three broad MT use contexts: web browsing, social media, and interactions that take place in a shared physical space. A thread running through these contexts is the complex and double-edged nature of MT’s impact. When MT tools work, they help messages to travel further and wider, but MT can also distort and mislead, especially when faced with the non-standard language of social media posts. On public sector websites, MT provides access to information, but translation errors can also ostracise and potentially harm vulnerable communities. As part of the process of navigating these risks and benefits, the chapter calls for further research on MT’s portability and its capacity to permeate different spaces as an embedded, and sometimes inconspicuous, service. We highlight the need for more collaboration between translation and interpreting and for more examination of increasingly blurry distinctions between physical and virtual environments and between technologies themselves. Working across these blurred boundaries is, we argue, essential for future research on translation, interpreting and multilingual communication.