The first NeTTT (New Trends in Translation & Technology) conference held on 4-6 July 2022, in Rhodes Island, Greece, was co-organised by the ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University (DCU). The conference was distinctive and interdisciplinary in hosting a breadth of discussions about the latest research in translation technology. The conference chairs included ADAPT’s postdoc researcher Dr Sheila Castilho, who works in the area of Linguistics, Machine Translation and Human-Computer Interaction at ADAPT.
The conference aimed to bring together academics in linguistics, translation studies, machine translation and natural language processing, as well as developers, practitioners, language service providers (LSPs) and vendors who work on various aspects of technology for translation. The conference was preceded by a two-day summer school in Neural Machine Translation. The conference also presented a workshop on translation technology for creative domains, centred around state-of-the-art technology used in the translation of literary texts with deeper underlying meanings and complex structures.
Additionally, one of the five accomplished speakers who led conversations on AI-driven ‘Augmented Translation’ was Prof Sharon O’Brien. She was a funded investigator with ADAPT for over ten years and is currently a professor of Translation Studies in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, DCU, and Associate Dean for Research at DCU’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The other invited speakers at the event included Valter Mavrič, Director-General of the Translation Service (DG TRAD) at the European Parliament, Merit-Ene Ilja, Translation Director in the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission, Marcello Federico, Principal Applied Scientist at AWS AI Labs, USA and Prof. Mikel L. Forcada, professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat d’Alacant and president of the European Association for Machine Translation (2015-2021).
The event was co-organised with Dimetra Academy for Translators, Greece; the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting and the Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Greece; the Research Group in Computational Linguistics, University of Wolverhampton, UK; and the Association of Computational Linguistics, Bulgaria.
The NeTTT conference was hugely successful in bringing some of the most brilliant interdisciplinary researchers, professionals and leaders in translation technology together in one place. The summer school, the engaging tutorials, the enriching discussions and the delicious dinners after highly productive and insightful workshops, were received with great enthusiasm by professionals and academics alike.
For more information on the topics discussed and other details, visit their website.
