Can algorithms translate the world? : A digital discourse analysis of Google Translate’s algorithmic agency in the translation of news reports

Abstract: Google Translate’s mission is “to enable everyone, everywhere, to understand the world and express themselves across languages” (Pitman, 2021). But are algorithms capable of leading us beyond the translation of the word toward an understanding of the world? Computational linguistics research has been interested in assessing this kind of real-world effects of technology and invited other disciplines to join their effort. With this purpose, this study examines the ways the algorithmic agency (Maly, 2022) elicits a ‘movement of meanings’ (Silverstone, 1999) when mediating news reports from English to Portuguese – the official language of Brazil, the country with the greatest use of Google Translate (Turovsky, 2016). For that, it investigates how algorithms convert appraisal and semiotic elements that carry ideological stances. The bilingual sample consists of six news articles on the U.S. Capitol attack published in U.S. outlets, two each of right, center, and left political leaning, along with their translations obtained through Google Translate. The analytical framework encompasses Fairclough’s (2003) CDA methods that allow an exploration of how discourses embedded in these texts represent the social phenomena that are being depicted. This lens is complemented by the Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) to investigate how value positions are constructed within texts through evaluation. A third analytical tool is necessary to engage with the ways in which meanings are moved from source to target texts. For this, van Leeuwen’s (2008) notion of recontextualization affords an assessment of the processes inherent to translations. The analysis showed that algorithms neutralized appraisal through lexical choices, changed semiotic elements through recontextualization, and blurred stances by standardizing the target language. The paper, thus, concludes that Google Translate constructed power by renaming reality and enacted it by reshaping evaluations, advancing research that seeks to examine algorithms’ impacts on digital discourse. Speaking from the epistemic locus of the Global South, this thesis proposes a critical reflection on the ideologies concealed by the self-proclaimed discourse of the universality of digital technologies.