Right out the gate, machine translation has played a starring role, with perhaps four out of every five speeches and discussions dedicated to machine translation and MTPE (machine translation post-editing).
Of course, with such a plethora of talks available there was a lot to learn, and we’ll share some of the highlights in a series of articles. This article will tackle select proceedings from Day 1 of the NeTTT conference.
For coverage of the other days of the conference, see our articles here:
Context is key in MT: Highlights from the NeTTT conference (Day 2)
Towards better MT: Highlights from the NeTTT conference 2022 (Day 3)
The conference began with a keynote speech by Sharon O’Brien uruguay mobile database on the topic “Augmented Translation: New Trend, Future Trend, or Just Trendy?”. O’Brien is a professor of translation studies at Dublin City University in Ireland, and a major name in the translation academe.
Augmentation, to put it simply, means allowing humans to overcome physical and mental limitations through technology. Translation, according to O’Brien, is already an augmented activity thanks to the use of translation management tools and the internet.
What’s interesting is that under this schema, machine translation remains an unknown factor. There is, of course, MTPE, but for the most part the potential of machine translation to augment human ability have not yet been realized to a great extent. There’s much research and innovation that needs to be done before machine translation can be considered a truly augmented activity.