New language technologies are driving major changes in the language services of institutions worldwide, including the Swiss Confederation. Based on a definition of change management as a combination of adaptation measures at both the organisation and individual levels, this study used a survey to gather unprecedented quantitative data on the use and qualitative data on the perceptions of machine translation (MT) by federal in-house translators. The results show that more than half of the respondents use MT regularly and that translators are largely free to use it as they see fit. In terms of perceptions, they mostly anticipate negative evolutions along five dimensions: work processes, translators, translated texts, the future of their language services and job, and the place of translators within their institution and society. Their apprehensions concern MT per se, but even more the way it is seen and used within their organisation. However, positive perspectives regarding efficiency gains or usefulness of MT as a translation aid were also discussed. Building on these human factors is key to successful change management. Academic research has a contribution to make, and the coming together of translation and organisation studies offers promising avenues for further research.

We conducted a survey to understand the impact of machine translation and post-editing awareness on comprehension of and trust in messages disseminated to prepare the public for a weather-related crisis, i.e. flooding. The translation direction was English–Italian. Sixty-one participants—all native Italian speakers with different English proficiency levels—answered our survey. Each participant read and evaluated between three and six crisis messages using ratings and open-ended questions on comprehensibility and trust. The messages were in English and Italian. All the Italian messages had been machine translated and post-edited. Nevertheless, participants were told that only half had been post-edited, so that we could test the impact of post-editing awareness. We could not draw firm conclusions when comparing the scores for trust and comprehensibility assigned to the three types of messages—English, post-edits, and purported raw outputs. However, when scores were triangulated with open-ended answers, stronger patterns were observed, such as the impact of fluency of the translations on their comprehensibility and trustworthiness. We found correlations between comprehensibility and trustworthiness, and identified other factors influencing these aspects, such as the clarity and soundness of the messages. We conclude by outlining implications for crisis preparedness, limitations, and areas for future research.