The Rhetorical Mediator: Understanding Agency in Indigenous Translation and Interpretation through Indigenous Approaches to UX
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018, I became involved in a collaborative community-based project to co-organize an event with the purpose of collecting resources to help in the professionalization efforts of Indigenous translators and interpreters. Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial theories, this interdisciplinary study examines the work done during this event through a user experience (UX) research lens that analyzes the various ways in which Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) can better support Indigenous language practices. The colonization of the Americas brought a layer of issues that continue to affect the way in which Indigenous communities conduct their work because, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1987) and Anibal Quijano (2000) point out, Indigenous people continue to live under colonizing systems. Indigenous interpreters and translators work in legal, medical, and educational fields. Their primary job is to translate specialized information into more accessible information, to and from Indigenous languages, that can be understood by non-specialized audiences, all while negotiating the biases, power dynamics, values, loyalties, and emotions of the different users for whom they mediate, users who belong to very different worldviews. In this Dissertation, I examine testimonios of Indigenous interpreters and translators through a design thinking process as a means to understanding agency in Indigenous interpretation and translation. The findings in this study emphasize the need of Indigenous interpreters and translators to contribute to their communities and to advocate for Indigenous linguistic rights. This study highlights how lack of awareness about Indigenous matters and discrimination have a strong effect on their profession, hence the importance of including Indigenous practices to UX research and placing equity rather than usability at the core of UX.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it