West Country Voices feature Respond’s article with The Guardian ‘Lost in AI Translation’
West Country Voices feature Respond’s article with The Guardian ‘Lost in AI Translation’ in new publication on the detrimental effects of AI on language access
Over a year later, Alice Knight-Garcia from independent UK-based West Country Voices looks back on Respond’s feature in The Guardian ‘Lost in AI Translation’, shedding light on the growing concern surrounding the use of Artificial Intelligence, particularly by the US government, when processing asylum applications: an issue that has only become more pressing with the inauguration of the Trump administration.
“Interpreters and translators are linguists, which means that they understand language on a deeper level than a non-linguist and much more comprehensively than an AI translation tool. Languages contain subtleties and cultural references that can only be acquired and ‘meta-textually’ used by a human.”
In this new response to the problematic use of AI in asylum cases, Knight-Garcia stresses the importance of human interpreters and translators in the asylum sector, building on aforementioned thematics such as the real-life implications of AI translation inaccuracies and the weaponization of small languages through the prioritization of the English Language, highlighted in The Guardian article by Respond’s Afghan Languages Lead Uma Mirkhail and Executive Director and Co-Founder Ariel Koren. In addition to this, critical issues such as “Bias and institutionalised racism in AI” and “AI and compliance with international law” are also raised as Knight-Garcia expresses concern for the lack of legally binding safeguards protecting individuals from the errors that come from the use of AI in asylum cases.
At Respond, we are committed to widening language access through professional trauma-informed interpretation and translation. However, the increasing use of AI as a replacement for human translation services in the asylum process is threatening this empathetic aspect of translation and interpretation that is so crucial in these circumstances. Indeed, no two asylum cases are the same and therefore cannot be processed using AI programs that are unable to capture the cultural, social and linguistic nuances that inevitably come with each human lived experience.
Read more on West Country Voices: https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/the-cruellest-language-barrier-how-ai-translation-is-letting-down-asylum-seekers/
