[acc-cca-l] CFP: News Translation and Artificial Intelligence

Mon Sep 8 12:00:11 MDT 2025

[△EXTERNAL]

Hello CCAers,

My colleague Julie Gramaccia and I are co-editing a volume on the use of artificial intelligence in news translation, and we'd like to invite you to send a proposal and to share this CFP with anyone you know who might be interested.

Thank you,
Kyle

CFP: News Translation and Artificial Intelligence

Edited by Julie Alice Gramaccia (University of Ottawa) and Kyle Conway (University of Ottawa)

In the last half-decade, research on artificial intelligence has exploded, following the exponential growth in the capacity and use of large language models. Among media scholars, the impact of AI on journalism has been a frequent focus (e.g., Guèvremont & Brin, 2024; Roy, Brin, & Gramaccia, 2021). In a parallel fashion, the literature on AI in translation, predicted in the 1950s by communication scholar Warren Weaver (1955), has also grown quickly, focusing on the technologies of translation (e.g., Liu & Li, 2023) and translation studies as a field (e.g., Sun, Liu, & Moratto, 2025). Rarely, however, have these lines of inquiry intersected to consider the effects of AI on journalism and translation, despite the growth of news translation research over the past quarter century (Valdeón, 2025). This volume will begin to fill that gap by bringing together scholars from communication, media and journalism studies, translation studies, computer science, and science and technology studies to describe how journalists and news organizations have adopted AI. How has it changed the ways they produce news or relate to their audiences? What challenges have they faced, and what news opportunities does AI present?

It is clear that AI is profoundly changing journalism, especially with respect to organizations’ ability to tailor content to individual consumers. For instance, in a 2023 report, about a quarter of media company leaders in more than fifty countries said they used AI recommendation algorithms to drive traffic on their sites (Newman, 2023). News organizations have also explored ways to use AI to produce news, such as by aggregating reports from multiple places. Their approaches raise practical questions, related, for instance, to overcoming consumer distrust of AI-generated news (Becker, Simon, & Crum, 2025). They also raise ethical questions, related to fact-checking and transparency (Wu, 2024). Certain patterns have begun to emerge, such as the geographic distribution of AI use favouring the global North, given the greater number of resources available in European languages as compared to languages indigenous to the global South, as well as the expense associated with AI development (Partha, Tabassum, Goni, & Kundu, 2024; Pinto & Barbosa, 2024).

What little research has been done on news translation using AI has confirmed these trends. Journalists address issues of trust, for instance, by recognizing the continued necessity to review automatically generated translations manually to ensure quality (Poirier & Roy, 2024; Yang, Liu, Qian, & Ni, 2023). But important questions remain, such as how news translation might improve access to news in local, less widely spoken languages of the global South.

Hence the impetus for this book. The editors are seeking chapters of 7,000 to 8,000 words addressing dimensions of news translation and AI such as (but not limited to):

AI, translation, and the profession of journalism
• Has AI-assisted translation changed the roles journalists play in the process of gathering and producing news?
• In what ways do journalists’ views of AI intersect (or not) with those of editors, of media owners, and/or of AI engineers?

The production and reception of AI-translated news
• How has AI-assisted translation changed the work of journalists working in local, less widely spoken languages?
• How do acknowledgments that a journalist has used AI to translate an article shape consumers’ trust?

Methods for studying news translated with AI
• How can methods drawn from communication studies, translation studies, and other fields be made complementary, to bring new insight to news translation research?
• How can data- or text-mining tools help scholars assess translated news texts?

Timeline: The editors are requesting abstracts of 300 to 500 words, to be sent to Prof. Julie A. Gramaccia (jgramacc at uottawa.ca) and Prof. Kyle Conway (kconwa2 at uottawa.ca) by November 1, 2025. The editors will respond to proposals by December 1, 2025. Authors whose proposals are selected will submit their full chapters by May 1, 2026, and the editors will prepare the manuscript for submission during Summer 2026.

The editors plan to submit the manuscript to the Benjamins Translation Library series (https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl), published by John Benjamins, a leader in the field of media and translation studies.

Please address any questions to Profs. Gramaccia and Conway at the addresses listed above.

References

Becker, K.B., Simon, F.M., & Crum, C. (2025). Policies in parallel? A comparative study of journalistic AI policies in 52 global news organisations. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2431519.

Guèvremont, V., & Brin, C. (Eds.). (2024). Intelligence artificielle, culture et médias. Presses de l’Université Laval. https://doi.org/10.1515/9782763758787.

Liu, X., & Li, C. (2023). Artificial intelligence and translation. In C. Sin-wai (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation technology (2nd ed., pp. 280–302). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003168348-16.

Newman, N. (2023). Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2023. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:NokooZeEP.

Partha, S.B., Tabassum, M., Goni, M.A., & Kundu, P. (2024). Artificial intelligence (AI) and future newsrooms: A study on journalists of Bangladesh. Pacific Journalism Review, 30(1–2), 96–110. https://doi.org/10.24135/pjr.v30i1.1235.

Pinto, M.C., & Barbosa, S.O. (2024). Artificial intelligence (AI) in Brazilian digital journalism: Historical context and innovative processes. Journalism and Media, 5(1), 325–341. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia5010022.

Poirier, É.A., & Roy, J.-H. (2024). L’outil Ultrad de La Presse Canadienne: La traduction automatique dans un contexte journalistique. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 36(1), 71–105. https://doi.org/10.7202/1107567ar.

Roy, J.-H., Brin, C., & Gramaccia, J.A. (Eds.). (2021). Intelligence artificielle: Coup de grâce ou coup de pouce pour le journalisme? [Special dossier]. Cahiers du journalisme et de l’information, NS7. https://cahiersdujournalisme.org/Serie-2/V2N7/.

Sun, S., Liu, K., & Moratto, R. (Eds.). (2025). Translation studies in the age of artificial intelligence. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003482369.

Valdeón, R.A. (2025). Journalistic translation research twenty-five years on: Methods, topics and prospects. Perspectives, 33(4), 635–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2025.2516364.

Weaver, W. (1955). Translation. In W.N. Locke & A.D. Booth (Eds.), Machine translation of languages: Fourteen essays (pp. 15–23). Greenwood Press.

Wu, S. (2024). Journalists as individual users of artificial intelligence: Examining journalists’ “value-motivated use” of ChatGPT and other AI tools within and without the newsroom. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849241303047.

Yang, Y., Liu, R., Qian, X., & Ni, J. (2023). Performance and perception: Machine translation post-editing in Chinese-English news translation by novice translators. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02285-7.

--
Kyle Conway (il/lui | he/him)
Professeur titulaire | Full professor
Département de communication | Department of Communication
Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa
Pavillon Desmarais, 11e étage | Desmarais Building, 11th Floor
55, av. Laurier est | Laurier Ave. East
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
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