There's been much talk recently about machine translation and interpreting. Erja Tenhonen-Lightfoot thinks the new technologies could be practical in certain uses.

“The more a situation follows a fixed format and content, the better machine interpreting could work. Take weather reports: they always follow the same pattern. In Canada, they've been using machine translation on weather reports for more than twenty years.”

The more informal and less pattern bound the context, the worse the fit for machine translation and interpreting Ms Tenhonen-Lightfoot finds.

“Such situations often lead to quite comical and absurd results and major misunderstandings. You get misunderstandings even with human translators and interpreters, not to speak of machines. Still, I'm not totally opposed to machine interpreting. I think you could well let machines handle the ‘boring and routine’ jobs and leave the more challenging and enjoyable jobs to humans.”

Ms Tenhonen-Lightfoot thinks tools for machine translation and interpreting could be useful aids. There are already automatic speech to text literation systems.

“The International Criminal Court in the Hague is already using a system that converts speech spoken into microphones into text on a screen in the interpreting booths. So there are many potential uses. There are many risks, but machine interpreting aids could also promise many benefits.”