Panel Summary: Educating and Assessing the Human Translator in an Age of Technology

Educating and Assessing the Human Translator in an Age of Technology Patricia Phillips Batoma, Roxana Girju, and Elizabeth Lowe Center for Translation Studies, Departments of Linguistics and French University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801 {pphillip, girju, elowe}@illinois.edu, with Patricia Minacori, Université Paris VII Denis Diderot Abstract This paper presents a few ideas of the Center for Translation Studies at University of Illinois on the present and future of human and machine transla­ tion. In particular, as we will elaborate at our panel, we believe that we should focus more on how we prepare humanities students to succeed as translat­ ors in a technology-driven environment. At the MT Summit panel, we will discuss the interface between human and machine translation and the re­ lated pedagogical and research issues. 1 Introduction* Machine Translation (MT) as well as Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) have seen remarkable advances in the last decade. However, current MT tools are not a serious choice for professional translation in any language combination. Moreover, translation practitioners are still looking for productive ways to merge the two approaches. Our belief is that a greater attention should be giv­ en to the process of training translators in an era of technology. The community should also pay close attention to empirical studies of translation so that * This document is a preamble to the panel we organize at the MT Summit 2009: “Preparing Translators for the current technology landscape”; panelists: Roxana Girju, Patricia Batoma, Elizabeth Lowe (U. of Illinois), and Patricia Minacori (U. of Paris) computational linguists will have a better idea of what really goes on in human translation and de­ velop tools that will be more useful for the end. The research component of the Center for Transla­ tion Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign addresses a variety of domains, such as literary translation, e-learning, machine and ma­ chine-assisted translation. Software is also being developed to make the assessment of translation quality more consistent and efficient (Minacori, this volume). The Center is committed to develop translation methodologies that foster interdisciplin­ ary thinking; to establish liaisons and collaborative projects with translation organizations in other countries; and to build bridges between the study of the art and sciences and computer technology. The goal of using computers for translation is not to replace human translation, but to produce rough translations which can serve as starting point for published translations, as the basis for information gathering, and as cross-language communication. The field of machine translation focuses on the us­ age, research and development of computer tools and systems which translate text passages automat­ ically from one language to another. These tools and systems can range from large systems for cor­ porations to translation aids for individual translat­ ors. This is a promising direction as shown by the cur­ rent research in cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual summarization, multilingual text gen­ eration, multilingual question answering, and so forth. Thus, in addition to basic machine transla­ tion tools, in the near future we …

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