Artificial intelligence facilitates many aspects of translation. Although AI technologies are becoming more integrated into translation practice and training, the ethical implications of their use are not given as much systematic attention as technical competencies (Moorkens 2025). To address this, courses on the ethical aspects of AI in translator training are needed. These courses should introduce students to current ethical issues and encourage them to critically reflect on ethical questions and potential injustices.
We therefore designed an AI and ethics course at the Faculty of Translation in Germersheim. Starting with an introduction to AI and ethics, the course then focused on specific ethical issues related to AI, such as skill development, social implications, and environmental concerns.
We used gamification in our teaching approach to foster student engagement. As ethical reasoning requires active engagement with complex and often ambiguous scenarios, gamification can encourage motivation and interaction (Al-Khresheh 2025, Khaldi et al. 2023). Throughout the semester, students participated in weekly competitions, earning points as they went. While these points were not linked to the final course grade, they contributed to a prize awarded at the end of the semester.
To investigate whether this approach had increased the students’ understanding of AI-related ethical issues, the course was evaluated using a pre- and post-course questionnaire. The questionnaire assessed changes in students’ self-reported awareness of ethical challenges associated with AI technologies, and attitudes towards their use and regulation. Preliminary findings indicate increased awareness of ethical challenges following the course.
This presentation will introduce the course design and discuss the rationale behind integrating gamification into AI ethics education. As the course designers and instructors, we acknowledge the exploratory nature of the study and the methodological limitations. We will therefore also discuss future research, including the integration of authentic assessment tasks.
Athanasios Breskas holds an MA in Translation from the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germersheim. He is a doctoral researcher at the TRA&Co Center and a project partner in STARK-LS. His research interests include virtual reality, augmented reality, eyetracking, keylogging, artificial intelligence, machine translation, foreign language acquisition, cognition and easy language.
Katharina Oster studied at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies in Germersheim, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in translation. In 2013, she started a research position at the TRA&Co Center, which she still holds today. In 2019, she finished her PhD project which focused on psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic aspects of word translation. Katharina has been a visiting scholar at the CRITT (Copenhagen Business School) and the INCYT (Buenos Aires, Argentina). She is currently responsible for the management of the EEG lab at the above-mentioned center. Her current research and teaching interests lie in psycholinguistics, NLP and ethics.
