Harmful Effects of Machine Translation and Their Mitigation
Mikel L. Forcada · 2024
While initially designed almost 70 years ago to enable the understanding of documents written in a foreign language—probably their main public use nowadays—machine translation is also routinely used to generate content to be published, ideally—but unfortunately not always—after careful editing by translation professionals. During the past few decades, the usefulness of machine translation systems has improved massively in these two usages, but their generalized deployment has brought about—and will bring about—many negative effects. This chapter presents a preliminary taxonomy of the main harmful impacts of machine translation by adopting a structured analysis to identify harming agents, actions, harms, processes, and harmed parties— who did what to whom and how . It further discusses how these harms can be mitigated and briefly comments on the legal protection available to harmed parties against these harming agents and the actual legal risk incurred by the harming agents. The aim of this analysis is to contribute to the debate on the issues that need to be addressed to foster a responsible and ethical deployment of machine translation.