Community-based participatory research: An example investigating machine translation use in a minority language community

Professor Lynne Bowker from the University of Ottawa will give a talk on : Community-based participatory research: An example investigating machine translation use in a minority language community Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a collaborative approach involving not only researchers but also community members and service providers. Each group brings different strengths, and meaningful participation by all groups can lead to an increased overall understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. We explore the use of CBPR to investigate the potential of machine translation for offering an efficient and cost-effective means of translating sections of the Ottawa Public Library website into Spanish to better meet the linguistic needs of the Spanish-speaking newcomer community. One-hundred and fourteen community members participated in a recipient evaluation, where they evaluated four different versions of a translated portion of the library’s website—a professional human translation, a maximally post-edited machine translation, a rapidly post-edited machine translation, and a raw machine translation. Participants also considered metadata such as the time and cost required to produce each version. Findings show that while machine translation cannot address all needs, there are some needs for which the faster and cheaper post-edited versions are considered to be useful and acceptable to the community.

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