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Project Leads

Sathya Rao

Team Members

Ife Adebara

Cluster: The Role of Advanced Digital Technologies in Shaping Citizenship and Belonging

Multilingual translation is a key component to inclusion and equity policies implemented by Canadian cities. Over the past five years, Canadian cities have increasingly resorted to machine translation (e.g., Google Translate) to translate public-facing documents. This project examines how Canadian urban centers use machine translation as part of their digital translation policy to translate public-facing documents intended for immigrants, particularly those speaking a low-resource language.

The project objectives are:

1. To provide a comprehensive overview of how major Canadian urban centers use machine translation to translate public-facing resources for immigrants;
2. To compare and assess cities鈥� use of machine translation based on machine translation literacy standards;
3. To evaluate the quality of automatic translations of public-facing municipal documents into African languages, including Oromo and Amharic.

1. How do Canadian urban centers regulate the use machine translation?
2. Does machine translation meet the needs of immigrants speaking low-resource languages, like Oromo and Amharic?

The research draws on the concepts of 鈥渢ranslation policy鈥� (Gonz谩lez N煤帽ez) and 鈥渄igital translation policy鈥� (Sandrini) and recent developments in the field of machine translation literacy (Bowker). The assessment of machine-translated municipal documents will be performed using a hybrid evaluation approach that combines automatic metrics and human judgment (Rei et al., 2020).

The project is currently in the Planning stage.

Machine translation; translation policy; municipalities; immigration; Canada