Fellowship success for early career researcher
Congratulations to Dr Diana Singureanu who has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to explore machine interpreting in legal contexts.
Dr Singureau’s project is on ‘The Artificial Court Interpreter: Machine Interpreting and Fairness of Justice’.
Dr Singureanu is a research fellow in our Centre for Translation Studies (CTS) and the subject of her project fits perfectly in the research we carry out in CTS where we combine theory with real-world practice, focusing on the economic, technological and social impact of translation and interpreting. Dr Singureanu’s research also benefits from our interdisciplinary approach at Surrey where she collaborates with academics in the Surrey School of Law.
This project aims to explore the potential a new generation of technologies, namely AI-powered language technologies, to provide language support in legal proceedings for court users whose first language is not that of the country where the court proceedings are taking place, such as migrants and refugees. Given the demand for interpreters and the challenging nature of interpreting, along with the high accuracy requirements for legal interpreting, the project raises timely questions about the efficacy of AI-powered language technologies in both supporting interpreters and operating autonomously through machine translation.
At the same time, Dr Singureanu will address ethical considerations of drawing on such technologies with a view to preventing digital exclusion of court users whose first language is not that of the court and ensuring fairness of justice. As a practical output, she will make practice-based recommendations for the use of AI-powered language technologies in legal communication settings.
Commenting on Dr Singureanu’s award, Professor Patricia Pulham, Head of School of Arts, Humanities and Creative Industries (SAHCI), said: “It’s always gratifying to see one of our early career researchers awarded such a competitive fellowship. Diana completed her PhD at Surrey and has progressed from being our PhD student to a valued researcher on one of our European projects EU-WEBPSI, to now gaining a prestigious three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. We're very proud of her."
Dr Singureanu says: “The Centre for Translation Studies, with its research at the intersection of human-led and automated approaches, and its strong ties to Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI, offers an ideal environment for my research. I am excited to be starting my Fellowship on 1 December.”
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