CAMBRIDGE CONVERSATIONS IN TRANSLATION
Translation and Technology
A workshop led by Professor Andrew Rothwell

Dear All,

The next event in this Term's `Cambridge Conversations in Translation' series will be a workshop on the topic of `Translation & Technology'. It will take place on Monday 6th February, 2-4 pm in Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, at CRASSH (7 West Road, CB3 9DT). 
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26901

The workshop leader, Professor Andrew Rothwell, will explore topics such as the automated alignment of source and target texts, the convergence of Machine Translation (MT) and Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT), and the use of aligned texts as a basis for literary criticism.

This session should be of interest if you are actively involved in research in these areas, or if you are a user of MT or CAT software, or if you simply wish to know more about state-of-the-art translation systems.

This event is free and open to all -- we look forward to seeing you there!

The CCiT Team

*****************************************************
WORKSHOP:

‘Translation Technology: some uses of alignment’
Professor Andrew Rothwell (Swansea University)

Electronic alignment of source and target texts is a concrete  manifestation of the notion of translation equivalence, extensively challenged by translation theorists in recent decades. This paper will explore some of the ways in which alignment has been implemented in translation tools since the 1940s, and suggest that, rightly or wrongly, equivalence remains the dominant paradigm. It will focus on two contrasting themes:

1. Convergence of (automatic) Machine Translation and (human-controlled) Computer-Assisted Translation. A brief historical overview of approaches to doing translation with computers will yield an informal typology of alignment techniques (rule-based, statistical, string-matching). Originating in one of the two camps, each is now crossing over to the other, thereby blurring what was until recently a clear distinction: modern MT is trained on aligned corpora a.k.a. translation memories, while CAT tools now use rules and statistics to extract sub-segmental matches  from TMs. A complete merging of the technologies seems likely in the near future.

2. Aligned text as a resource for translation and criticism. Taking the example of an ongoing project to retranslate Emile Zola’s novel La Joie de vivre (1884) into English, the second part of the talk will discuss the experience of using translation memory in the performance of literary translation. Zola’s original was aligned with Ernest-Alfred Vizetelly’s near-contemporary but bowdlerized text of 1888, still the only widely-available English version, using the freeware tool LF Aligner. The resulting TM allows a precise appreciation not only of the extent of Vizetelly’s extraordinary self-censorship, but also of the stylistic norms 
of literary translation in his day.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Professor Andrew Rothwell is Professor of French, subject-leader for Translation Studies and chair of the Translation and Multilingualism (TRAM) research group. He also coordinates the School's MA in Translation with Language Technology and PhD Translation programmes and is co-chair (with Dr John Goodby, English) of the Modernisms research group. After a BA in French and German at St John's College, Oxford, he stayed on to begin a DPhil on the French Modernist poet Pierre Reverdy, before taking up a one-year post as lecteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm) in Paris. A Laming Travelling Fellowship at the Queen's College, Oxford then took him back to Paris, followed by lectureships in French at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds. He was appointed to a chair in Swansea in 1999.

For information on CCiTrans mailing list visit: 
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/crassh-ccitrans

For information on our Research Group visit our web page: 
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/cambridge-conversations-in-translation