Privacy Issues in Online Machine Translation Services - European Perspective

Privacy Issues in Online Machine Translation Services – European Perspective. Pawel Kamocki, Jim O'Regan IDS Mannheim / Paris Descartes / WWU Münster Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin Email: kamocki@ids-mannheim.de, jaoregan@tcd.ie Abstract In order to develop its full potential, global communication needs linguistic support systems such as Machine Translation (MT). In the past decade, free online MT tools have become available to the general public, and the quality of their output is increasing. However, the use of such tools may entail various legal implications, especially as far as processing of personal data is concerned. This is even more evident if we take into account that their business model is largely based on providing translation in exchange for data, which can subsequently be used to improve the translation model, but also for commercial purposes. The purpose of this paper is to examine how free online MT tools fit in the European data protection framework, harmonised by the EU Data Protection Directive. The perspectives of both the user and the MT service provider are taken into account. Keywords: machine translation, privacy, personal data 1. Introduction During the last couple of decades, English has established itself as the global language, especially on the Internet (it is estimated that 53.7% of all websites use English; Russian comes second with only 6,3%1). However, only 25.9% of Internet users speak English as their native language (as of November 30, 2015)2 Therefore, it has been noted that in order to develop its full potential, global linguistic communication on the Internet requires linguistic support systems (Cribb, 2000), such as Machine Translation (MT). 1.1. MT in Context MT (or automatic translation) can be defined as a process in which software is used to translate text (or speech) from one natural language to another. This section will briefly present the history of MT and various technologies used in the process. 1.1.1. History The idea to mechanize the translation process can be traced back to the seventeenth century (Hutchins, 1986); however, the field of machine translation is usually considered to have begun shortly after the invention of the digital computer (Koehn, 2010). Shortly after the WWII, Warren Weaver, a researcher at the Rockeffeler Foundation, published a memorandum named “Translation” in which he put forward the idea to use computers for translation, proposing the use of Claude 1 According to: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_la nguage/all , last accessed March 7, 2016. 2 According to: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm , last accessed March 7, 2016. Shannon's work on Information Theory to treat translation as a code-breaking problem (Hutchins, 1999). Research and commercial development in Machine Translation continued in the “rule-based” paradigm, in which a dictionary, a set of grammatical rules, and varying degrees of linguistic annotation are used to produce a translation, until the early 1990s, when a group of IBM researchers developed the first “Statistical Machine Translation” system, Candide (Berger et al., 1994). Building on earlier successes in Automatic Speech Recognition, which applied Shannon's Information Theory, the group applied similar techniques to the task of …

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