The Introduction explains important concepts and what they mean in this book. It also outlines the project scope, which covers both written and spoken uses of machine translation to fulfil communication and information access purposes in one of the sectors selected for analysis. Following a brief historical account of how social conceptions of machine translation have changed, the Introduction addresses a recent shift in translation research towards multilingual communication practices that take place outside education settings or the language services industry. Given how fast language technologies are evolving, it will not take long for the tools and types of human–computer interaction that appear in the book to change quite significantly. The Introduction addresses implications of this dynamic landscape for this book specifically and for translation and multilingual communication research more broadly.

This chapter is about trust. It is the only chapter in the book that considers the opinions of professionals who had not used machine translation at work. Most of these professionals were prepared to use machine translation if needed. Some were enthusiastic about it. Others had reservations which they would want to see addressed before deciding to use a machine translation tool. These reservations included: (1) concerns about accuracy; (2) concerns about privacy and confidentiality; (3) perceptions of social and professional norms and whether their use of machine translation would be accepted by others; and (4) concerns about how machine translation may lack ‘the human touch’ in sensitive interactions. The chapter examines human communication in relation to the concept of empathy and AI’s ability to mimic it. It ends with a discussion of workplace training by exploring what machine translation users would like to see covered in initiatives aimed at enhancing their trust judgment abilities.

This chapter traces how contemporary media pass through different regulatory zones and examines the different rules that govern each zone and how the zones relate to each other. It briefly charts the recent and ongoing evolution of the media, from analogue roots to generative AI futures, and notes the fundamental rights and regulatory ramifications of technology-driven innovations. It draws an analytical line from these conceptualisations through to the contemporary threats to media freedom that regulation urgently needs to address.

Welfare economic theory seeks the justification for government intervention in markets, in market failure, and in distributional issues. An analysis of the market failures that exist in a specific industry or market can not only provide justification for government regulation or other kinds of intervention in general, but it can also suggest which type of intervention or regulation is optimal from a welfare economic perspective. This chapter addresses the question of how the emergence of news aggregator platforms and the introduction of generative AI in news production have affected the market failures that constitute the core problem underlying private investment in news production. The focus of the analysis is on the public good character of news and the positive externalities of news production. The question addressed is: Have the consequences of these existing market failures become more prominent or have they been resolved by these developments? Based on this analysis, the chapter discusses how this informs policy concerning these developments.

This chapter explores the delicate balance between the need to combat online disinformation and the safeguarding of fundamental rights, particularly media freedom and pluralism, as essential elements of freedom of expression and democracy. The chapter outlines the evolution of the EU’s policies and regulations related to information integrity and discusses the key elements and challenges of the EU’s approach to addressing disinformation in the context of media pluralism. Focusing on the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Digital Services Act, and the European Media Freedom Act, the chapter discusses their complex interplay and overarching strategy, which delegates the critical task of assessing systemic risks and fundamental rights – including media freedom and pluralism – to very large online platforms.

Infrastructures that underlie public debate have a significant role in public opinion formation and have long been regulated in multiple ways. Limiting the domination of opinion power by particular interests has been one of the stated aims of such regulation. But the approaches have also depended on the often-unstated presumption of a journalistic-editorial role being highly influential in the formation of public speech and opinion. This chapter examines how communication infrastructures have changed with the development of major platforms and resulting changes in journalism’s role within public debate. These changes raise new regulatory challenges if opinion power is to be limited, and they make the positive dimensions of freedom of expression all the more valuable for understanding what would now be required for communicatively legitimate forms of democracy. The chapter examines aspects of the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act in light of freedom of expression’s positive dimensions to consider how European law and practice might promote a pluralism of public speech that is curated in the audience’s interests.

The 1980s ushered in a new era of electronic music in Yugoslavia with the introduction of personal computers. The young and progressive composers Srđan Hofman and Zoran Erić established the first computer music studio in Yugoslavia – the Tonski Studio of the Faculty of Music, which opened in 1986. The state-of-the-art facility acquired Apple Macintosh II machines in 1988, becoming one of the very few Macintosh-equipped studios in Europe. Composers who studied at the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade in the 1970s and 1980s quickly traded the outdated analog machine for personal computers. The arrival of the modern equipment quickly brought Yugoslav computer music into dialogue with developments abroad. Vladan Radovanović embraced computer composition in his pieces from the 1980s. Younger composers used sampling. However, these new and dynamic technological explorations would abruptly come to a complete halt only three years later, with the start of the Yugoslav Wars and the ensuing brutal economic sanctions.

This chapter discusses whether the ‘platformisation’ of digital news and associated changes in financial flows to news organisations require legislative or regulatory action if quality journalism as we know it is to survive. It specifically examines the role of copyright and the EU press publishers’ right contained in the CDSM Directive in that context and whether other regulatory responses might be more effective and appropriate.

Generative AI systems threaten to usurp the market for human press and media productions. To enable journalists to act as ‘watchdogs’, highlight societal problems, and prompt necessary changes, remuneration rules should offer support for quality journalistic work by humans. In the EU, the rights reservation option following from Article 4(3) of the 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market – now flanked by the provisions of the AI Act – could support a remuneration system focusing on the use of human journalistic content for AI training. While AI training income would benefit media companies that own large repertoires of journalistic work, individual journalists might not receive an appropriate revenue share. This chapter suggests introducing a general output-based payment obligation on all providers and users of generative AI systems involved in media productions: both companies offering generative AI systems and companies using these systems in the media sector. Mandatory collective rights management could ensure payment directly to individual journalists, as in the repartitioning schemes of collecting societies. The remuneration could also finance funds that improve journalists’ working and living conditions. When distributing AI remuneration, social and cultural institutions could prioritise public interest journalism as a countermeasure to AI-generated misinformation and disinformation.