macht.sprache. fosters politically sensitive translation through a platform for crowdsourcing and discussing politically sensitive terms and their translations, and through a tool to help translate with sensitivity.
Anna von Rath, Lucy Gasser, Timur Celikel
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Showcase at the UNLOCK Demo Day in October 2022:
Discrimination works in and through language. This is challenging in single languages and poses even more problems in translation. Existing digital translation tools tend to reproduce the biases of the corpora they were trained on, perpetuating exclusionary power structures. They are also not attuned to context-specific political sensitivity in the target language and can insert discriminatory content absent from the original.
macht.sprache. provides support for politically sensitive translation. On the macht.sprache. platform, users collaboratively build free knowledge about politically sensitive language and its translation, and learn about inclusive language from each other. Through increased visibility and user testing, macht.sprache. will hone the support it provides and achieve a more broad-based impact. An extension for popular translation programs like DeepL as well as the development of browser plugin will allow macht.sprache. to provide low-threshold support to a larger user base.
