Let’s talk about MT : raising awareness in Swiss universities

Since the advent of neural machine translation, we have been witnessing a major change in written multilingual practices not only on websites and social media but also in academic contexts. Both translation of content and multilingual communication have suddenly become available at the click of a button instead of being entrusted to trained translators and linguists. In a country like Switzerland, with its long tradition of multilingual text production in the three official languages plus English, these developments are welcome but are also being viewed with some caution. A variety of new and creative practices have emerged amongst individuals, yet most of them remain undocumented and unguided. Our project explores current attitudes and practices regarding MT in Swiss universities. Initial results show how user profiles (e.g. students, teachers, researchers, academic support staff) call for differentiated approaches to fostering MT Literacy.