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‘It's like talking about how I use a pencil': Journalists' use of machine translation in their work

Summary

Journalists regularly work across languages, yet almost nothing is known about how they use machine translation (MT) on the job. This exploratory study examines that gap for Finland. The authors combined an anonymous Finnish-language online survey, which yielded 68 valid responses, with ten interviews conducted in October 2023 and June 2024. They asked how and in which work processes journalists use MT, why they use it, and how they handle its risks. Participants were found to weave MT naturally into many tasks. These include assimilation (information gathering, background reading, gisting) and dissemination. They were reluctant to use MT for live communication such as interviews. Most relied on conventional neural tools and mainly translated languages they already partly knew, because they need to verify the output themselves. They were aware of risks and had ways to reduce them, but lacked formal guidance. The study adds to emerging research on paraprofessional MT use. It also records a snapshot from just before LLMs were built into mainstream MT tools.

Key points

  • Data: the survey ran 25 April–25 May 2024 and drew 69 responses, of which 68 were analysed. Ten interviews were also conducted. Recruits came from journalist unions, the top 3 national and 13 largest regional newspapers, Yle, MTV3 and STT.
  • 98% of respondents used traditional MT tools like Google Translate or DeepL. Only 10% used LLM translation such as ChatGPT. Interviewees said their employers were introducing in-house LLMs.
  • English and Swedish topped the list of languages translated most often; all respondents (100%) said they knew English, and 78% said they knew Swedish. Rarely spoken languages were avoided because the output could not be checked.
  • Perceived risks were meaning distortion, lost nuance, data security problems and poor interaction. Mitigation strategies included comparing several MT tools, translating into multiple target languages, preferring English as the target, and consulting dictionaries or colleagues.
  • Limitations are the small, single-country sample, so results cannot be generalised. The authors call for MT guidelines and training for journalists. The work belongs to the DECA project funded by the Research Council of Finland.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages · Machine translation

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{nurminen2026it,
  title = {{‘It's like talking about how I use a pencil': Journalists' use of machine translation in their work}},
  author = {Nurminen, Mary and Havumetsä, Nina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.42/}
}

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