On 25 November, CIOL joined forces with the European Commission, Durham University and ITI for a Translating Europe Regional Workshop on the opportunities and threats of machine translation for professional translators.

Speakers at the half-day seminar in Durham addressed the topic from a variety of angles. The keynote presentation by Professor Dorothy Kenny from Dublin City University offered an academic perspective, discussing the architecture of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, reactions to SMT in translation studies, the opportunities for translators and the ethical issues raised. An institutional point of view was provided by Dr Markus Foti from MT@EC, the machine translation service at the European Commission, while Nigel Goffe MCIL and Jon Olds MITI shared their experiences of working with machine translation as professional practitioners. Questions from some of the 110 attendees were put to all four speakers in a lively panel discussion.

The event was one of a series of joint initiatives between CIOL, the European Commission and ITI, including a Clear Writing workshop (2012), Legal Translation conference (2013) and the Future-proofing the Profession event, survey and report (2014).

CIOL would like to record special thanks to Stephen Turkington and Paul Kaye from the European Commission and Dr Sally Wagstaffe from Durham University for their key roles in organising the event.

Presentations

The slides from two of the day's presentations can be found below:

Dr. Markus Foti:  The European Commission's Machine Translation Service

Keynote: Prof. Dorothy Kenny:  Machine Translation: Broadening our horizons