This ongoing PhD project examines the role of communication practitioners in international transfer processes within multinational companies (MNCs). Language use is vital when it comes to eliciting employee commitment to managerial initiatives. In MNCs, this may pose a challenge due to differing languages and cultures. 

Recent research within language sensitive IB suggests that the work of employees who take on the role paraprofessional translators significantly impacts the strategic direction of the MNC. 

This dissertation uses interviews, observations and corporate texts to shed light on the role of MNC communication practitioners, whose work frequently involves paraprofessional translation. It also highlights the need to include both the corporate texts and the employees who translates them when studying international transfer processes.  

Contact person: Victoria S. Nydegger Schrøder

This project explores the cognitive-linguistic foundations of human translation processes that appear to be fast and easy. Until recently, these processes that are marked by uninterrupted typing activity (absence of pauses), were attributed to linguistic similarities between languages. However, the default translation hypothesis suggests that these uninterrupted stretches of typing activity may be caused by cognitive routinization processes translators undergo aided by repetitive translation behavior and experience. Using keylogging data we find that linguistic similarity indeed is not an explanatory factor in itself.  

Researcher/contact person: Claudia Förster Hegrenæs

This ongoing project examines the role of pre-editing and human intervention within translation workflows despite the rise of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and its promise of improved quality. While NMT outputs tend to struggle with non-formulaic structures, the idiomaticity of language, the dominance of source languages, the nuances of culturally sensitive content, and some other pragmatic and grammatical considerations, pre-editing has shown considerable effectiveness in specialized texts before translation or machine intervention. However, the ethical implications associated with pre-editing in specialized translation, combined with the use of NMT, have also garnered increasing attention, highlighting the ethical dilemmas posed by these technologies and text intervention. Some concerns include ownership and authorship, data privacy, and the autonomy and professional identity of human translators. 

To address the ethical concerns surrounding the role of translators, the perception and definition of pre-editing, and the validity of this context, a controlled experiment is conducted using pre-edited and non-pre-edited texts. The experiment includes various metrics, such as pre-editing logs, MQM-based error annotation, time measures, surveys, and interviews. 

Contact person: Claudia Elena Urrego Zapata