The DECA project consortium investigates epistemic capacities, defined as an individual’s access to reliable knowledge, their ability to participate in knowledge production, and society’s capacity to make informed, sustainable policy decisions. As a tool both for accessing information across language barriers and for producing multilingual information, machine translation also plays a potential role in supporting these epistemic capacities. In this paper, we present an overview of DECA’s research on two perspectives: 1) how migrants use machine translation to access information, and 2) how journalists use machine translation in their work.

The DECA project consortium investigates epistemic capacities, defined as an individual’s access to reliable knowledge, their ability to participate in knowledge production, and society’s capacity to make informed, sustainable policy decisions. In this paper, we focus specifically on the parts of the project examining the challenges posed by multilinguality in these processes and the potential role of MT in supporting access to, and production of, knowledge.