HiT-IT 2019: Invited speakers and special presentations
Talk 1: Yves Champollion (WordFast): MT Acceptance Among Translators: Are We Nearing the Tipping Point
Talk 2: Yves Champollion (WordFast): Rosetta Stone Decipherment
Yves Champollion was born 1956 in Paris, France. He is related to the early nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, whose contributions to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics were instrumental to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.
Yves freelanced as a translator between 1982 and 1995, when he translated and published the French versions of several popular science books that were bestsellers in the US, including Darwin On Trial by P.E. Johnson. From 1996 to 1999, he was a project manager and consultant for large translation projects at world-class translation agencies (Translatel, Linguex…), which led to his involvement in projects for SAP R/3 & R/4, Siemens, Alcatel, Microsoft, IBM, ABB and Ford, to name a few.
Starting in 2000, he developed the Wordfast and PlusTools suite of Computer-Assisted Translation tools, a popular product among translation agencies and freelance translators, with over 55,000 paid licenses in use as of 2019.
Widely travelled, in addition to French, German, English, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and some Japanese, Yves has also had time to get acquainted with Shangana, a language spoken in Mozambique, where he sponsors a secondary school. Lastly, he is an enthusiastic conference speaker, having delivered countless keynote addresses and lectures throughout his career, and particularly since he launched the Wordfast line of products for the translation industry.
Personal website: http://www.champollion.net
Professional website: http://www.wordfast.com
Talk 3: Vilelmini Sosoni (Ionian University, Greece): Translators and Technology: Dancing a Tango Nuevo
Dr Vilelmini Sosoni is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, where she teaches Legal and Economic Translation, EU texts Translation and Terminology, Translation Technology, Translation Project Management and Audiovisual Translation (AVT). In the past, she taught Specialised Translation in the UK at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Roehampton University, and in Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Institut Français d’ Athènes. She also has extensive industrial experience having worked as translator, editor, subtitler and intepreter. She holds a BA in English Language and Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MA in Translation and a PhD in Translation and Text Linguistics from the University of Surrey. Her research interests lie in the areas of Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation (MT), Cognitive Studies, Translation of Institutional Texts and AVT. She is a founding member of the Research Lab “Language and Politics” of the Ionian University and a member of the “Centre for Research in Translation and Transcultural Studies” of Roehampton University. She has participated in several EU-funded projects, notably TraMOOC, Eurolect Observatory and Training Action for Legal Practitioners: Linguistic Skills and Translation in EU Competition Law, while she has edited several volumes and books on translation and published numerous articles in international journals and collective volumes.
Talk 4: Carla Parra Escartín (Unbabel, Portugal): The story of how academic and industrial research meet to put humans in the loop of Artificial Intelligence
Carla Parra Escartín is the Director of Linguistic Services at Unbabel. She holds a M.A. Degree in English Philology from the University of Zaragoza (Spain), M.A. Degrees in Translation and Applied Linguistics from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain), and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Bergen (Norway). She has over 10 years of research experience in linguistic infrastructures, human factors in machine translation and multiword expressions (MWEs). Throughout her career she has worked in various EU-funded and national research projects and actions in Spain, Norway and Ireland. She has over 30 publications including book chapters, journal papers and research papers at internationally peer reviewed conferences. She has also served as reviewer for the most prestigious venues in Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, including ACL, EMNLP, WMT, EAMT, COLING and MT Summit. She is a nominated officer of the Standing Committee of the SIGLEX-MWE, a special interest group focusing on research in MWEs and a member of the Editorial Board of the Phraseology and Multiword Expressions Series (LangSci Press). She is currently the Director of Linguistic Services at Unbabel and her team is in charge of monitoring the quality of all Unbabel translated content, both produced by the machines and by our community of editors. Their analysis is used to provide linguistic insights as to what are the most common errors observed and how to tackle them to improve the overall quality of the translations delivered to the Unbabel customers.
Special presentation: Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, UK): The world’s first Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme in technology for translation and interpreting and the new generation of translators and interpreters
Prof Dr Ruslan Mitkov has been working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and related areas since the early 1980s. Whereas Prof Mitkov is best known for his seminal contributions to the areas of anaphora resolution and automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, his extensively cited research (more than 250 publications including 15 books, 35 journal articles and 36 book chapters) also covers topics such as machine translation, translation memory and translation technology in general, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, evaluation, corpus annotation, NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals, text simplification, NLP for people with language disabilities and computational phraseology. Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and Editor of the most successful Oxford University Press Handbook – The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering published by Cambridge University Press and Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers. Dr Mitkov is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press, co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the forthcoming second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Prof Mitkov is the coordinator of the first international (Erasmus Mundus) Master programme on Technology for Translation and Interpreting. He has been invited as a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences including conferences on translation and translation technology; he has acted as Programme Chair of various international conferences on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation, Translation Technology (including the annual London conference ‘Translation and the Computer’), Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Anaphora Resolution. Dr Mitkov is asked on a regular basis to review for leading international funding bodies and organisations and to act as a referee for applications for Professorships both in North America and Europe. Ruslan Mitkov is regularly asked to review for leading journals, publishers and conferences and serve as a member of Programme Committees or Editorial Boards. Prof Mitkov has been an external examiner of many doctoral theses and curricula in the UK and abroad, including Master’s programmes related to NLP, Translation and Translation Technology. Dr Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit (more than є 25,000,000) and is currently acting as Principal Investigator of several large projects, some of which are funded by UK research councils, by the EC as well as by companies and users from the UK and USA. Ruslan Mitkov received his MSc from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995 and where he set up the Research Group in Computational Linguistics. His Research Group has emerged as an internationally leading unit in applied Natural Language Processing and members of the group have won awards in different NLP/shared-task competitions. In addition to being Head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics, Prof Mitkov is also Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing. The Research Institute consists of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics and the Research Group in Statistical Cybermetrics, which is another top performer internationally. Ruslan Mitkov is Vice President of ASLING, an international Association for promoting Language Technology. Dr Mitkov is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany and was invited as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France; he also serves as Vice-Chair for the prestigious EC funding programme ‘Future and Emerging Technologies’. In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof Mitkov was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in November 2011. At the end of October 2014 Dr Mitkov was also conferred Professor Honoris Causa at Veliko Tarnovo University.