Democratizing translation technologies: the role of humanistic research

Recent research on translation memories and machine translation technologies tends to focus on technical issues only, falsely abstracting the technologies from the many different social situations in which they are ostensibly to be used. At the same time, the revolutionary promise of the systems with learning potential is that they will improve output only with widespread use, and thus only through the involvement of different groups of social users. In principle, humanistic research is well positioned to investigate and communicate between the various users, with awareness of different kinds of user, collaborative workflows, text types, and translation purposes. If knowledge on those variables can be fed back into the technical research and development, humanistic research could thus play a key role in enhancing not only the social impact of the technologies, but also their democratization