The research area Translation, ethics and digital transformation takes a critical look at the historical dimensions and socio-political significance of language and translation technologies. We examine various phenomena of digital translation from a socio-cultural and empirical perspectives, focusing on their ethical, ideological, (geo)political, social, economic and media entanglements.

The focus is on the relationship between translation technologies and society as well as multimodal and cooperative forms of transcultural communication. These include translation technologies such as machine translation and interpreting, automatic speech recognition and synthetic speech output, multilingual chatbots, intelligent language assistants, photo-based translation apps and sign language avatars. Of particular interest in this context are pedagogical and didactic questions regarding the education and training of translators and interpreters as well as the individual and social impact of AI-based multilingual language and translation technologies.