KEYNOTE SPEECH: Why language automation needs you

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing language and translation policies is the fostering of a multilingual and multicultural society with democracy, equity, tolerance, and kindness. The European Union’s multilingualism accords with many of those aims and should be regarded as a major achievement in world history. Yet it must now be extended: it must reach many more languages, involve much more than translation, and concern more than the language professions. We must recognize that the automation of language work theoretically enables all citizens to remove the opacity of the foreign by themselves. The risk, however, is that we come to trust all those automatically produced words and thereby lose the motivation to question them, to explore them, and to learn and enjoy languages, leading to a historical curtailing of multilingualism. This talk will outline that challenge and highlight a few practical ways in which it can be addressed.