Chapter 5 MT developers
Martin Volk, Samuel Läubli · 2024
While several studies have explored the skills that people require to use machine translation (MT) systems, little is known about the people who build them. We conducted a small survey among MT developers to gather data on their qualifications, roles, tasks and skills. We find that, almost regardless of their role, MT developers assume a broad spectrum of tasks, ranging from data acquisition to system training and evaluation. With regard to the future, our survey participants feel that specialized roles - particularly Data Curators - will emerge and that programming skills will continue to be more important than language skills in many roles. We also contrast market and societal needs for MT described in the scientific literature with trends and topics that our participants describe as important in MT development. We find little awareness for topics related to inclusion - such as making MT less biased and more accessible - among MT developers. Part of the reason for this could be that, at least in terms of gender, the MT development community itself is male dominated: 90% of the MT developers who participated in our survey identify as male (which is in line with our own observations).