Video: Dr Joss Moorkens' lecture on Ethics and Neural Machine Translation - 21/04/2021

Speaker's short bio: Dr Joss Moorkens is Chair of postgraduate translation programmes at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University and a Funded Investigator at the ADAPT Centre. He has authored over 50 articles, book chapters, and conference papers on translation technology, user evaluation of machine translation, translator precarity, and translation ethics. He is General Co-Editor of the journal Translation Spaces and co-edited the book Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice (2018), and special issues of Machine Translation (2019) and Translation Spaces (2020). He sits on the board of the European Masters in Translation network and is a member of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies.

Abstract of the lecture: Neural MT can facilitate communication in a way that surpasses previous MT paradigms, but there are also consequences of its use. As with the development of any technology, MT is not ethically neutral, but rather reflects the values of those behind its development. This talk considers the ethical issues around MT, beginning with data gathering and reuse and looking at how MT fits with the values and codes of the translator. If machines and systems reflect value systems, can they be explicitly ‘good’ and remove bias from their output? What is the contribution of MT to discussions of sustainability and diversity? Rather than promoting an approach that involves following a set of instructions to implement a technology unthinkingly, this talk will highlight the importance of a conscious decision-making process when designing a data-driven MT workflow.

This was the first lecture of the Centre for Translation Studies' Convergence lecture series and took place on the 21st of April 2021.