AUTHOR=Plenter Johanna Ida TITLE=Advantages and pitfalls of machine translation for party research: the translation of party manifestos of European parties using DeepL JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science VOLUME=5 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1268320 DOI=10.3389/fpos.2023.1268320 ISSN=2673-3145 ABSTRACT=
Parties are the central actors in representative democracies as they perform important democratic functions. Thus, the identification of party positions is a crucial concern. Party researchers mainly rely on party manifestos to estimate policy positions. However, the analysis of manifestos is accompanied by challenges—one of the biggest being cross-national comparisons because of different institutional settings and languages. This article discusses machine translation (MT) as a new option for party research, and reports on the author's experiences with the translation of more than 200 party manifestos using the commercial artificial intelligence (AI) translation tool