Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community

In the global research community, English has become the key language of scholarly publishing in many fields. Simultaneously, online machine translation systems have become gradually easy to use and access. Is this a researcher’s match made in heaven, or the road to publication perdition?
In  Machine Translation and Global Research, (PDF), authors Jairo Buitrago Ciro and Lynne Bowker introduce the concept of machine translation literacy, a new kind of literacy for librarians and scholars in the digital age. Scholars describe how machine translation works, how it is (or could be) used for scholarly interaction, and how both non-native and native English speakers can write in a translation-friendly way to use its potential. Native English speakers can continue to write in English, but increase the global reach of their research by making it easier for their colleagues around the world to read and understand their works. In contrast, non-native English speakers can write in their mother tongues but influence machine translation technology to assist them produce draft publications in English. For academic librarians, the authors offer a framework for supporting researchers in all disciplines as they face producing translation-friendly texts and using machine translation for scholarly communication—a form of support that will only become more vital as campuses become increasingly international and as universities continue to struggle to excel on the global stage.

Machine Translation and Global Research is a must-read for scientists, students, researchers, and librarians eager to maximize the global reach and influence of any form of scholarly work.

Review

Ciro and Bowker describe ways that machine translation is used in the context of scholarly communication and propose how to use it more effectively. Getting an online machine translation is easy, they say, but it is usually more complex to make critical and successful use of a machine translation as part of the scholarly communication process. They include scholarly communication, machine translation, expanding the reach of knowledge through translation-friendly writing, some broader implications of using machine translation for scholarly communication, and a framework for machine translation literacy. — Annotation ©2019 Ringgold Inc. Portland

NOTE: The product only includes the ebook Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community in PDF. No access codes are included.