Guest editors:
Deborah Giustini & María Jiménez-Andrés
Language rights encompass the right to choose and use one’s language in various spheres, including legal, educational, and media contexts (De Varennes 2007). Globally, minority language speakers and their associated language rights face threats from factors like national language dominance, assimilation, and colonialism, leading to declining usage (Romaine 2007). In particular, the rapid advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are significantly impacting language rights and multilingual societies.
Language policy and planning increasingly attend to the role of technology in the revitalization of endangered languages and more widely, in the governmental promotion of multilingualism and social justice (Gazzola et al. 2023). International organizations such as at the EU level are often at the forefront of preserving language rights as fundamental rights of people and essential components of their cultural heritage. Initiatives like the Digital Language Equality and European Language Equality projects aim to support languages for them to prosper in the digital age (Gaspari et al. 2023). International organizations, NGOs, and humanitarian groups as well prioritize managing communication and preserving linguistic diversity through technologies to enhance information dissemination in crisis settings (Tesseur 2018; O’Brien et al. 2018; Federici & O’Brien 2019; Jiménez-Andrés & Orero 2022).
However, digital services remain unevenly accessible to vulnerable communities like migrants and refugees, reliant on supporting organizations (Jiménez-Andrés & Orero 2022), and facing obstacles related to digital literacy, potentially exacerbating social exclusion. Additionally, NGOs and humanitarian aid groups encounter limited adoption of translation and interpreting technologies (Rico 2019). Machine translation is often reserved for donor and official publications (Hunt et al. 2019), with limited support for minority languages since it is primarily designed for commercial and organizational use (Nurminen & Koponen 2020). Although many organizations endorse video remote interpreting (VRI) as a cost-effective solution, technical infrastructure limitations constrain use in humanitarian settings (James et al. 2022). Furthermore, technology use in organizations raises ethical and quality concerns, notably seen in the increasing reliance on AI-powered translations in asylum and immigration systems (Giustini 2024a, 2024b).
Recent developments in the field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) could aggravate the already disadvantaged situation of certain languages. LLMs often perform badly in non-standard languages, yet they play a growing role in life-altering decision-making settings, such as justice, asylum, and healthcare. Trained on human language, LLMs perpetuate racial and gender biases (Wang, Rubinstein & Cohn 2022), impacting accountability and necessary corrective measures as machine-made mistakes remain opaque.
This issue relates closely to tech companies’ role in language rights. Current LLMs are mostly property of a few tech giants (most of them from the Global North), raising ethical concerns about AI resource concentration, transparency, and open science criteria (van Dis et al. 2023). Developers prioritize LLM applications for languages with more reliable performance, perpetuating lower model performativity and exacerbating under-representation of languages and social groups from digital spaces (Weidinger et al. 2021; Rozado 2023). While LLMs can level language barriers, they may be exploited by high-income countries and privileged groups. In the Global South, tech firms based in the Global North are leveraging economic disparities to create products that further entrench Western hegemonic dominance in AI, and thus digital colonialism (Healy 2023, 4). Unequal internet access and hardware requirements also mean that LLM benefits are seldom accessible to all (Sambasivan & Holbrook 2018).
Finally, technological advancements in remote interpreting (Fantinuoli 2018; Giustini 2022), computer-assisted interpreting (Fantinuoli 2023), gig translation/interpreting models (Fırat 2021; Giustini forthcoming), AI/LLM training (Healy 2013), and machine translation (Rothwell et al. 2023) have raised questions about fair employment rights in the language industry. These changes also led to a re-evaluation of working conditions, roles, and identities, enhancing efficiency and flexibility but requiring professionals to adapt to machine integration, with implications for skills, labor pricing, and job satisfaction.
Against this backdrop, the special issue illuminates the critical need to address concerns at the intersection of language rights and technology, especially as we delve into the complex challenges faced by vulnerable communities across various contexts. Furthermore, it emphasizes the call for increased research to unravel the intricate societal, political, humanitarian, and organizational factors that amplify language-related power imbalances, specifically in the context of technology’s evolving landscape.
Just. Journal of Language Rights and Minorities, Revista de Drets Lingüístics i Minories is seeking submissions for a special issue on the topic of language rights and technology. The special issue aims to propel a debate on the dynamics and challenges surrounding the intersection of language rights and technology, exploring how advancements in (but not limited to) artificial intelligence, machine translation, machine interpreting, and digital communication impact linguistic diversity and accessibility, as well as language communities and policies, in our increasingly interconnected world.
Researchers are invited to submit articles in English, Spanish, or Catalan. Articles are expected to represent research across a wide range of disciplines, as well as inter- and transdisciplinary studies. The special issue aims to foster more interdisciplinary discussion among scholars from translation and interpreting studies, social sciences, political sciences, development studies, human-computer interaction, and science and technology studies, among other fields. We welcome any article that contributes to our understanding of the crossroads between language rights and technology. In preparing their submission, authors may wish to consider and address the following guiding questions:
Organizations, technologies, and vulnerable communities:
Ethical and quality concerns in technology use:
Tech companies and language rights:
Impact on language professionals:
Language, human rights, and technologies:
AI and linguistic communities:
Digital linguistic landscapes:
Just. Journal of Language Rights & Minorities, Revista de Drets Lingüístics i Minories is a journal dedicated to disseminating scholarship on the protection, enforcement, and promotion of the rights of linguistic minorities as well as related themes arising from the confluence of language, the social dynamics of dominance and oppression, and the law. Interested authors are invited to send 500- to 700-word proposals (excluding references) and inquiries directly to the guest editors: Deborah Giustini (dgiustini@hbku.edu.qa) and María Jiménez-Andrés (mandres@hbku.edu.qa) by May 1st, 2024. Please include a brief 150-word bionote about the authors, their affiliations and contact details in a separate file. All abstracts and manuscripts should use the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) for both citation (https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html) and drafting. A summary of the drafting CMS guidelines is available in Just’s author guidelines (https://ojs.uv.es/index.php/JUST/about/submissions). Authors of abstracts that are accepted for consideration will be invited to submit a full manuscript that is between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (exclusive of abstract and references but including footnotes). Every manuscript will be submitted to a double-blind peer review that includes at least two referees.
For more information, click here.
Guest editors:Anna Strowe (University of Manchester)Richard Mansell (University of Exeter)Helle V. Dam (Aarhus University)This special issue focuses on the normative expectations around translators, including norms around translator identity, as well as around hiring or selection processes and understandings of competence or expertise. By applying the concept of norms to the area of translators and translatorship, we hope to connect conversations about the multiple intersecting systems of values that underpin those norms, often silently, ranging from beliefs about education, language skill, and qualification, to understandings of professionalism, economics, and translation itself, while continuing to explore the dimensions and qualities of translator identity and presentation. The norms themselves are at the centre of the topic, along with the values from which they emerge and with which they engage, but as with investigation of other types of norms, they must be extrapolated from available forms of data, for example texts by and about translators, or trends in hiring or training.As scholarship in translation studies has broadened, first from linguistic approaches to cultural and sociological approaches, and then to a focus on the translator, we have increasingly come to understand that we must view translation as a socially-situated practice or set of practices, carried out by agents whose behaviour and choices are influenced by a variety of external as well as internal factors. A large part of the focus has been on using this perspective to better understand the choices that are made in translating – that is, the specific textual decisions made by translators – but interest has also grown significantly in questions that move beyond textual choices and comparative textual analysis. There are significant threads of scholarship for example on the cultural or structural aspects of non-professional translation and interpreting (e.g. Antonini et al. 2017; Pérez-González and Susam-Saraeva 2012), the relationships between translation and activism (e.g. Boéri 2024; Gould and Tahmasebian 2020; Tymoczko 2010), and the impact of emerging technologies and digital spaces on perceptions of translatorship (e.g. Zhang et al. 2024), among many others.Norms have long been a productive tool for translation studies, but existing articulations and uses have focused on the translational norms that we understand as governing micro- and macro-level translation choices. Meylaerts (2008) discusses individual translators and their identities and profiles in relation to the norms of translation and the profession, following Simeoni (1998) in connecting these to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. However, behaviour around translator identities and characteristics, such as hiring or self-presentation, can also be examined in terms of norms. In a recent article, Strowe (2024) suggests considering translator selection as norm-driven could help us better recognize the values and decisions around translator recruitment and deconstruct assumptions around translator choice and identity.These norms are reflected in patterns in hiring trends, the translation industry, job advertisements, and translators’ websites or blogs, for example, but they also inform a variety of aspects of how translatorship is constructed. The self-image and presentation or representation of translators is informed by beliefs about what responsibilities, tasks, and capacities are involved in being a translator, areas that intersect both with culturally constructed notions of what constitutes and delimits translation itself (see Tymoczko 2007) and with what forms of social, cultural, and legal understandings we have about various agents’ forms of responsibility for texts (see Bantinaki 2020; Pym 2011).The special issue will collect both empirical studies that explore areas related to translator norms, and articles exploring either the theorization of translator norms or the methodological possibilities of this kind of work. Potential questions to explore include (but are not limited to) the following:How might we theorize norms around translator identity, self-presentation, hiring etc.?What kinds of translator norms can be identified within the LSP industry or in other contexts in which translation is done?What differences are there in translator norms across different contexts or domains, and how do these differences affect practices of translation?How can we understand projections of translator image as a form of representation of translator norm? • How are translator norms changing in the face of developments in digital technology?What kinds of research methods facilitate the exploration of translator norms?This is an open call, and the editors particularly welcome proposals from researchers whose workintersects with translator identity or self-presentation;looks at industry expectations around translators and hiring practices;seeks to describe and delimit the spaces of human agency and identity around translation amidst the growing presence of AI.Submission Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted by November 24 to Anna Strowe by email (anna.strowe@manchester.ac.uk). Once invited to do so by the editors, selected authors will be asked to submit an article of between 7000 and 8000 words, including references, through the journal’s online portal no later than May 30, 2026.A full schedule of dates plus the bibliography is available here: https://benjamins.com/series/ts/callforpapers.pdf
Life Writing and Translation Thursday 18 – Friday 19 June 2026 University of Geneva Abstract of no more than 250 words (bibliography excluded) in English or French are now invited and should be submitted to lifewritingtranslation@unige.ch by 16 November 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be distributed at the beginning of February 2026. Please find more information on abstracts on the Conference website: https://www.humanmovement.cam.ac.uk/events/translating-conflict-and-refuge-language-displacement-and-politics-representation
APTIS25 Online Conference at the UCL Centre for Translation Studies (3–4 November 2025) “Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?” The UCL Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) is looking forward to hosting the APTIS25 online conference. The APTIS25 conference (“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”) will take place on 3–4 November 2025 via Zoom Webinar. We encourage submissions from both academic and industry speakers. Please see our Call for Contributions as well as the Types of Contributions section to know more about the contributions that APTIS25 will be welcoming. If you would like to contribute to APTIS25 by presenting a talk or a roundtable, please visit the Submit a Proposal section, where you will find the link to send your abstract. Please kindly refer to the Key Dates to know more about submission and registration deadlines. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/aptis25ucl
APTIS25 Online Conference at the UCL Centre for Translation Studies (3–4 November 2025)“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”The UCL Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) is looking forward to hosting the APTIS25 online conference. The APTIS25 conference (“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”) will take place on 3–4 November 2025 via Zoom Webinar.We encourage submissions from both academic and industry speakers. Please see our Call for Contributions as well as the Types of Contributions section to know more about the contributions that APTIS25 will be welcoming. If you would like to contribute to APTIS25 by presenting a talk or a roundtable, please visit the Submit a Proposal section, where you will find the link to send your abstract.Please kindly refer to the Key Dates to know more about submission and registration deadlines.https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/aptis25ucl
Hieronymus is the first Croatian journal dedicated exclusively to publishing research and professional articles in the field of translation studies and terminology. The journal has the following key goals: (1) to promote translation studies and terminology in Croatia and the broader region, where these two disciplines are not always recognized; and (2) to enhance local researchers’ visibility in the international translation studies community. For the Research Section of the journal, we welcome empirical studies with clear goals and well-defined methodology in any area of translation studies or terminology. In addition, papers presenting and discussing any area of professional translation or terminological practice are invited for the Professional section. Contributions by early career researchers (pre-Ph.D. or recently obtaining a Ph.D.) as well as young professionals are gladly accepted. In both sections of the journal, contributors from Croatia and the broader region are particularly welcome, in line with the journal’s mission outlined above. The preferred languages are English and Croatian. We accept submissions throughout the year, but for consideration in issue 12 (to be published in December 2025), submissions need to be sent by 30 March 2025 at the latest. Submissions will first be considered by the Editorial Team and, if they pass this initial screening, they will be forwarded for a double-blind peer review. Authors whose papers are accepted for publication must certify that their work has not been previously published. All papers are published in Open Access under the Creative Commons 4.0 open license. For information on citation style and formatting, please consult our Contributors page and Submission Guidelines. Please send your contributions to the following addresses: knikoli@ffzg.unizg.hr sveselic@ffzg.unizg.hr If you have any queries regarding this call, please do not hesitate to contact us
