SFU alumna Rebecca Wolfe is calling for human assistance in machine-translation, among other improvements, after conducting research at both the United Nations and SFU regarding multilingualism at international institutions.
Wolfe suggests that, in addition to promoting multilingualism, international institutions such as the UN need to effectively use emerging technological tools while better incorporating the human aspect of translation.
During her undergraduate years, Wolfe took an interest in linguistics, which eventually led her to an internship in the UN editorial department during her Master’s of Publishing degree at SFU.
She explained, “For me, it was interesting see how they handle multilingualism in a multinational, multilingual organization. So I had some first-hand research I was able to do to actually observe what they do for publishing practices multilingually and then to gather information about the state of multilingual publishing today.”
Although the UN is committed to publishing materials in multiple languages, due to obstacles such as historical precedent and a lack of resources, they are not always able to do so. Wolfe argues that, while we do need to translate under-read works from other languages into English and bring them to an English-speaking audience, “English as an only option, or as a default, or as a source for most publication around the world, is problematic.
“The UN has an opportunity to promote multilingualism, and [. . .] they have a responsibility to protect linguistic diversity around the world,” said Wolfe.
In addition to discussing the issues of anglocentrism, her thesis contains insights on the modern fascination and mass-use of machine translation as well as its error rates and efficiency.
Wolfe explains that machine translation has improved drastically over time, and organizations such as the UN should take advantage of these advances to more readily incorporate multilingualism into their publishing practices.
Although Wolfe believes that improvement will likely continue to occur, she feels that human intervention is required alongside machine processing to enhance clarity of the translations.
“As anybody who’s tried to use google translate or any other online translators, there’s going to be mistakes. You will get some crazy results. It is good to get the right translator and have some human translating at the other end of it,” Wolfe explained.
Wolfe concluded: “I hope [my work] will be used by big organizations, universities, by academic publishers, because my main point is that multilingualism should not be an afterthought, and we shouldn’t lose linguistic diversity because it is a pain in the butt to translate things.
“A lot of languages are dying today,” she continued. “My main point is that I hope people will not be afraid to take the time to do translating and to pay attention to other languages besides English.”
