Lynne Bowker is Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Translation, Technologies and Society at Université Laval in Canada. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language and technology, and she has a particular interest in scholarly communication. As part of the DIAMAS project, she contributed to the development of toolkits and guidelines on multilingualism and gender equity, and she is a member of the CoARA WG on Multilingualism and language biases in research assessment. She received the 2023 Open Scholarship Award from the University of Ottawa Library. She is a member of the advisory board of several journals, including the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST). Her recent publications include Machine Translation and Global Research (2019, Emerald) and the fully open access book De-mystifying Translation: Introducing Translation to Non-Translators (2023, Routledge).
Multilingualism in scholarly publishing and responsible use of computer-assisted translation
Over the past few decades, English has become embedded as a key language for scholarly communication in many disciplines, but the approach of using a primary language for publication brings a number of disadvantages to individual scholars, to research, and to society. During this same period, the underlying approach used design and implement translation technologies has experienced a paradigm shift and now integrates AI-based techniques such as machine learning. While these translation tools hold promise for supporting a more multilingual scholarly communication eco-system, they cannot simply be adopted wholesale. Performance varies from one language to another, as well as from one discipline to another. In this workshop, we will explore how data-driven technologies work, where their strengths and limitations lie, and how we can interact with them in an informed and responsible way as we work towards the goal of increasing multilingualism in scholarly publishing.
