When Translation Meets Technologies: Language Service Providers (LSPS) in the Digital Age

In the last few decades the translation industry has been going through a rapid and fundamental change due to the emergence of new digital tools, including computer aided translation tools, statistical machine translation, crowdsourcing and social media, amongst others.

As a result, translation has become an increasingly complicated process, materialised in a virtual network of stakeholders. While increasing the speed of the translation process, recent advances in translation technologies have raised some concerns such as lower social status of the profession and digital disruption.

This project aims to solicit the views of one crucial group of stakeholders, Language Service Providers (LSPs), and to examine their beliefs and behaviours surrounding the use of translation technologies in order to identify effective and sustainable human-technology interaction, which can be applied to the practice of translation.

Phases

The project's first phase aimed to answer the following key questions:

• What is really happening in the industry in relation to technology?
• What are the merits and drawbacks of change to their business practice?
• How are practitioners and businesses dealing with change?

The second phase to the project will pursue emerging questions in each research member’s domain-specific areas at international level, based on the focus group data collected in the first phase at national level.

Collaboration

This is a collaborative project with the ITI (Institute of Translation and Interpreting), the largest professional body in the UK. Ultimately, together with ITI, we aim to propose strategies to deal with these new developments and disseminate examples of good practice within the profession.

Project members

• Dr Akiko Sakamoto
• Begoña Rodríguez de Céspedes
• Dr Sarah Berthaud
• Dr Zoe Dann
• Dr Wenjin Dai