Language Translation as a Socio-Technical System:Case-Studies of Mixed-Initiative Interactions

Seamless access to information in a rapidly globalizing world demands for availability of information across, ideally all but at the least a large number of, languages. Machine translation has been proposed as a technological solution to this complex problem. However, despite seven decades of research, and recently seen rapid progress in the field - thanks to deep learning and availability of large data-sets, perfect machine translation across a large number of the world’s languages still remains elusive. In fact, it is a distant and perhaps even an impossible goal. Erroneous translations, on the other hand, can be detrimental in critical situations such as talking to a law enforcement officer; or, they could potentially perpetuate social biases or stereotypes, for instance, by producing mis-gendered translations. In this work, we argue that language translation is inherently a socio-technical system, which has to be viewed, studied, and optimized for, as such. The need and context of translation, the socio-demographic factors behind the human translators as well as the consumers of the translated content affect the complexity of the translation system, as much as the accuracy of the technology and its interface. Through a series of case studies on mixed-initiative interaction based approach to translation, we bring out the various socio-technical factors and their complex interactions that one has to bear in mind while designing for the ideal human-machine translation systems. Through these observations, we make multiple recommendations which, at the core, suggest that ”solving” translation in the real sense would require more coordinated efforts between the technical (NLP) and social communities (HCI + CSCW + DEV).