Quyen

After studying computer science at the University of Oklahoma, Quyen began working with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an organization which seeks to advance civil and human rights for Asian Americans. In her role, Quyen monitors multilingual social media mis/disinformation content; she is currently considering a master’s degree in journalism with a focus in mis/disinformation.

What kinds of technology do you find yourself primarily using?
I’m on social media the most. I’m also an immigrant, and the only one that speaks English in my family, so I have to help my parents with the computer a lot, most of the time with banking apps or paying bills.

Have you found that technology to be accessible?
The application or interface is usually made for people who read and understand English. I hadn’t really thought about that until yesterday, when something struck me. For Bank of America, you see the statement balance with the due date – that’s usually what my mom looks at first and she always asks me why it’s still showing that amount if we’ve already paid it. Every time, I tell her that the statement balance is different from the amount due. When someone doesn’t speak English, they try to look at the numbers – the universal language – as a reference point. I think it would lead to less confusion if they had the status “paid” or “unpaid” first instead of the statement balance..

Do you feel like your identity groups impacted your experience studying computer science, or more generally in college?
Totally. I immigrated when I was relatively older, fifteen. Some study said that the ideal age to acquire a new language is around ten, and any older than that will be much harder. So for me, language is a huge barrier. The college application process is very complicated, and there’s a lot that’s unknown. I’m a first-generation student, so I didn’t have anyone in my family to guide me in that process. I also transferred from community college, so there was a lot I had to figure out on my own, which didn’t even have to do with the difficulty of studying computer science.

From your perspective, do you feel that technology is safe for historically marginalized communities?
I’m glad you worded the question that way, because I think we can move on to [the connection between] social media and information and the news, which is big for the Vietnamese American community – especially YouTube. You may have seen that politically, [more] Vietnamese Americans voted for President Trump than other Asian American groups. When I look at my dad and what he watches on YouTube and what his algorithm recommends, you eventually fall into rabbit holes and can’t distinguish whether something is actually true or credible. Especially for older people who may not be technology savvy, simply the fact of something being on the internet may make the content more credible.

That’s a great illustration of how algorithms have real-world implications on trends like voting. Was this part of your curriculum when studying programming?
I actually learned that more from [reading] articles outside of the classroom. In our curriculum, at least, we were more likely to focus on computer science as a theory and its application. Maybe it’s because I only have a bachelor’s degree, but we rarely did a deep dive on the subject – it’s more trying to get a basis of a little bit of every field for the students.

Given this, what changes do you want to see within tech? How can we make it safer for marginalized communities?
We have a lot of debate about free speech, whether or not we should allow some speech to be accessible or widely spread or not, but a lot of the time this conversation only focuses on
English-speakers. Because the United States is a cultural melting pot, we have people speaking lots of different languages. I’m sure that [the] Vietnamese [language] isn’t the only one that’s been contaminated by misinformation. I feel like people don’t really think about minority groups when they think about voter engagement, especially minority groups whose dominant language of communication isn’t English.

I would definitely love to see, at least in respect to computer science, better resources across languages. I volunteer as a translator and editor for a news aggregator where we translate reliable news from credible sources to Vietnamese. Doing that work, I can tell you that translating is a very difficult process; it’s not just looking up something in the dictionary and plugging it in, because each language has its own cultural nuances. I would love to see how the field of natural language processing can evolve to [address] that.

That’s such important work. Have you found that most of the sites your family members need to access have Vietnamese translations available?
I don’t think so. Usually when they need to access something, their default response is to go to me. Which is complicated, because on one hand, I’m not always available to translate for them. But on the other, if they have to go through me then I’m better able to monitor the kinds of sources they’re consuming. When you translate, the most difficult things to translate are the cultural nuances. For example, taking a very recent issue – abortions. In the United States, we have the slogans “pro-life” versus “pro-choice.” When you translate [the slogans] to different languages, “pro-life” is going to garner more sympathy than “pro-choice,” because it doesn’t really capture the position of people who say they’re pro-choice.

It’s also difficult to capture tone – to have an authentic translation while helping your audience understand why something is the way it is. For example, with former President Trump – when I read Vietnamese news, I think their translations make him sound a lot more competent than he really is. Many of his concepts don’t translate well into cross-cultural communication. A lot of Trump’s rhetoric relies on white supremacy and white nationalism, but when you translate that into Vietnamese, many people don’t see anything wrong with it, because nationalism is a crucial part of Vietnamese identity. They think, of course, they want to protect their country. They don’t have the same awareness of how dangerous it all is.