ABSTRACT
Rapid technological changes call for scholars’ critical stance more than ever in addressing new research agendas in translation studies. This chapter aims to tease out how evolving digital translation practices provide the impetus to re-focus on ethics in research and its implications for research design. For example, the largely unacknowledged secondary use of human translations as the training data in corpus-based machine translation (MT) has led to a new line of inquiry to question the ethics of MT. Such agendas echo the ethical implications of the data-centric technology infrastructure on which translation and other human activities are increasingly embedded. In turn, new types of non-professional translation (NPT) such as translation crowdsourcing and fan translation have emerged in the advent of scalable collaborative platforms supported by the new communications infrastructure. These NPT practices created controversy for ethical reasons ranging from the exploitation of translation as free labour, undercutting professional translation, to the unsolicited re-distribution of copyrighted materials by fans with their own translations. Surveying how scholars approach these practices, this chapter brings to the fore ethics as an undercurrent of methodological considerations in research arising from the continuing technologization of translation.
