In line with the theme of context, the next panel we were able to attend discussed a specific context-related problem in “Fixed Language Units and Machine Translation: Pragmatemes in Machine-Translated Subtitles” presented by Judyta Mężyk.
Mężyk defines pragmatemes as “autonomous, polylexical, semantically compositional utterances constrained in their signified by the situation of communication in which they are produced”.
If that sounds like a mouthful, what it basically means is text that communicates its full meaning only in the context it is part of. Examples include greetings such as “Hello!” or “Good morning!” and situational sentences like “How can I help you?” and “Sign here, please.”
Critical or uncritical? MT in the news
Newspapers and media are a major purveyor of mainstream bolivia mobile database views about current topics and trends, and as such make a good case for study. This is what researcher Elizabeth Marshman tackles in her panel “Weird, Wonderful, Worthy, and Worrying: Use Cases for MT as Described in Canadian Newspapers”.
Marshman shares various nuanced, as well as some relatively uncritical views of machine translation as presented by journalists in various newspapers, with a somewhat encouraging picture of machine translation’s portrayal in mainstream media. Still, there’s room for improvement in terms of making journalists more aware of the nuances.
Special mentions
As we brought up earlier, there were a few panels we were unable to attend but which we believe deserve some special mention.
The first concerns ethics regarding the development of models with concern for low-resource languages. This panel is “Machine Translation and Technocracy: Mitigating issues of power parity in MT for low-resource languages”, presented by Matt Riemland.