20 December 2023

I’m a reporter for the local newspaper of a mid-sized European city. The first time I used Google Translator in interviewing was in the spring of 2022 when the war in Ukraine had just started. A local group of professional bus drivers volunteered to drive to Poland, pick up some of the people wanting to leave for a safer place, and bring them back here. A freelance photographer and I joined the trip to report along the way.

On the bus was a Ukrainian man who was willing to talk to me. He spoke very little English and we had no interpreter, but the photographer suggested we try using Google Translator to communicate. I had my doubts about it, wondering if it’s ethically OK to use it that way, because there is a risk that something would go missing in the interview. But there we were on the bus with someone who was willing to talk to us, and we thought it would anyway be better to get an interview than not get one. This arrangement also seemed to be OK for the potential interviewee. A large part of the communication in that interview was conducted through Google Translator.

After that I’ve done more interviews with Ukrainians using Google Translator, but only when they know some English. We do the interviews mostly in English and use the translation app when we run into trouble understanding each other or one of us wants to explain something that we can’t do fully in English. So the translation app is a back-up support for communication instead of being the main method of communicating. But if there is no common language at all or the interviewee’s English is not good enough, then I would consider getting an interpreter instead.

Usually I suggest using a translation app when we are agreeing on the interview – I suggest that we use English with Google Translator as a back-up. Other times I’ve already started interviewing and then the interviewee pulls out their phone to communicate something. I’ve noticed that Ukrainians are used to using Google Translator. You start to talk and they pull out their phones. They’re also pretty good at it, at least if you compare it to how I used it back then. They also often use it with speech – they talk into the phone and then play the translation for you. I used to rely on the writing function but have now started to use it with speech more often.

And things do go wrong sometimes, maybe 5–10% of the time. When you use it in face-to-face communication, you can see immediately if there was a translation failure – I can see from the interviewee’s expression that something came out funny. This happens once in a while, but especially when we are talking about topics that have a lot of specific terminology – then things go wrong more easily. Sometimes I try explaining my way around a topic or asking, ‘Did you mean this?’ Every once in a while, some part of the interview is so hard to understand that I have to consider leaving it out.

Occasionally I use translation apps in other parts of my work too, mostly when reading background material for news articles, and mostly with languages I’m already familiar with. For example, when Shinzo Abe was assissinated, I wanted to read the material put out by the Japanese press. The large Japanese media site The Asahi Shimbun has information in English, but they have different information in Japanese and I wanted to read that. I know some Japanese because I was an exchange student in Japan when I was younger, but not enough to read the content quickly. So I translated the Japanese into English with the internet browser’s translation function, and between the English it produced and my own Japanese, I got deeper information.

I do have some doubts about using Translator. I wonder if the translations are really good enough for it to work or if I should be considering some other option. My biggest concern is that something could get left out or some meaning could go missing. But so far things have worked fine. And then again, the same risk is present when the interviewer and interviewee are both speaking English, which is neither one’s native language.

I think I can take the uncertainty of relying on a translation app pretty well. To me the most important thing is to make sure I understand, and write, the information and facts correctly. It is not as important to get the right tone, because as a journalist, I am responsible for facts and not tone. Some interviewees, especially those that are active in social media, can be strict about their image and might react when the tone of an article is not exactly how they’d like it to be. But the ethical guidelines for journalists make it clear that our job is not to give people good PR but to report on the facts. So facts are my focus, but in getting those facts straight, I still worry that something might be left out.

The people I’ve interviewed, on the other hand, seem to be fine with using a translation app. That might be because they are living in an environment in which all communication is a bit uncertain.

One thing I do to make sure I get things right is to send the article I write to the person I interviewed for comment before I publish it. This is something journalists commonly do, but what I do with Ukrainians is use a translation app to create two versions of the article: one translated into English and the other into Ukrainian. I want to make sure they are able to understand the text well enough to verify that it’s OK or make comments, and that they can comment on things in the Ukrainian translation that I can then check in the English version.

Another principle I have is that, when I’ve relied a lot on Google Translator in an interview, I always mention that in the article I write. I think the reader should know that. If they know anything about translation apps, they’ll understand that things might have happened to the original tone of the interview. That the facts are probably the same, but the tone might be a little different. It’s important to be transparent.

Why don’t I use a human interpreter? Sometimes I wonder if I should consider other ways of doing this. For example, the last time I was going to interview a Ukrainian, I thought seriously about using an interpreter. But the interpreter would most likely not be a professional – we tend to use non-professionals who just happen to know two languages, and my newspaper doesn’t have a process for finding and using a professional – so I figured that, with my decent English and a translation app, the benefit would be the same as if an interpreter does some kind of translation.

Also, in journalism you are always in somewhat of a hurry, which is not always such a good thing. Translation apps are simply faster, and you can get interviews that might otherways take a lot of effort. But I have to admit that there is a bit of pure feeling involved too – I feel like an interpreter would kind of come between the interviewee and me. That might slow down our communication and break the direct connection between me and the person I’m talking to.

In the end, the choice is sometimes to use Google Translator or have no interview at all. I have always felt that, even with the uncertainty involved, it’s more important to get the interview.