Ethical Considerations for Machine Translation of Indigenous Languages:
  Giving a Voice to the Speakers
Manuel Mager Elisabeth Mager Katharina Kann Ngoc Thang Vu
In recent years machine translation has become very successful for
high-resource language pairs. This has also sparked new interest in research on
the automatic translation of low-resource languages, including Indigenous
languages. However, the latter are deeply related to the ethnic and cultural
groups that speak (or used to speak) them. The data collection, modeling and
deploying machine translation systems thus result in new ethical questions that
must be addressed. Motivated by this, we first survey the existing literature
on ethical considerations for the documentation, translation, and general
natural language processing for Indigenous languages. Afterward, we conduct and
analyze an interview study to shed light on the positions of community leaders,
teachers, and language activists regarding ethical concerns for the automatic
translation of their languages. Our results show that the inclusion, at
different degrees, of native speakers and community members is vital to
performing better and more ethical research on Indigenous languages.