Randy Scansani, PhD student at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus), has just returned from a two-day trip at the European Commission in Brussels, where he attended the annual Translating Europe Forum. This year, the meeting focused on translation technologies and machine translation. Here is the report he prepared for us!
More than 450 translators, translation students and LSPs delegates attended the conference, enjoying talks about machine translation, translation quality evaluation and the impact of technologies on the work of translators. Many new products and their advanced features were presented to the audience, including CAT tools like CasMaCat and MateCat, and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), to evaluate translation quality.
The interview of Jost Zetsche, author of A Translator’s Tool Box, has proved a huge success. He made a thought-provoking statement about our future: the importance of sequences of words in our resources will lead us to abandon per-word rates and adopt hourly rates. If it is true that we don’t translate words, but rather ideas, and that we use words that are already stored somewhere in our data, does it make any sense to use per-word rates?
It was an incredibly stimulating and encouraging conference, which stressed the key role of human translators in the increasing use of translation technologies. Instead of fighting new technologies, it is vitally important to focus on how to leverage them and move towards a constructive dialogue with translation tool developers.