“Emergencies don’t discriminate, and neither should your response system”: dialogue on the use of machine translation in high-stakes contexts
Lara Downing
Program Manager, Victims of Crime Assistance Program
Community Refugee & Immigration Services (CRIS)
Abstract:
Machine translation has proliferated across many sectors of society, including high-stakes domains such as policing, healthcare, courts, and emergency communication centers. Adopted for its relative low cost, ease of use, fast response time, and broad language options, overreliance on MT without human interpreters raises urgent questions about accuracy, accountability, informed consent, privacy, and language rights. Public and nonprofit sector decision makers often face funding cuts, mounting federal pressure, lack of technical expertise, and limited guidance that is accessible, data driven, and from independent sources when incorporating AI products into their language access plans.
Using real-world use cases from her role as a social worker at a local immigrant services organization, Lara Downing will focus on the social impact of automated translation on marginalized communities. She will then invite attendees to share their perspectives. What role might academic researchers play in evaluating MT use in the wild? How might researchers contribute to clearer understanding of MT’s potential and its limits in the public and amongst key decision makers? What frameworks can guide its responsible application while mitigating the risks of critical miscommunications, erosion of due process rights, amplification of inequity, waste of public resources, and misuse of sensitive data? By bridging social work practice with computational linguistics, Lara’s goal is to foster dialogue on safeguarding linguistic rights while shaping a more ethically grounded trajectory for translation technologies.