Cambridge Conversations in Translation
TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Dear All,
You are warmly invited to this term’s first event in our Conversations in Translation series, which will take the form of a panel discussion on the topic of Translation and Technology.
We will be meeting on Monday 23rd January, 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
Our two speakers, Dr Adrià de Gispert and Dr Marcus Tomalin, will discuss how machine translation systems work and explore the impact of recent technology on both the art and craft of translation and on the profession. Please find below their academic profiles and more details on their talks.
There will be plenty of opportunities to participate in the discussion and if you are an occasional user of machine translation systems, and you have always wanted to know more about how they work, then this panel discussion is for you!
We look forward to seeing you there,
The CCiT Team
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PANEL DISCUSSION:
‘How does Statistical Machine Translation work?’
Dr Adrià de Gispert
The use of machine translation technology has experienced a boom during the last 15 years, as the amount of data produced, collected, translated and globally shared grew exponentially. Statistical models of bilingual texts have been described and are being used by global search engines to produce “translations” to millions of queries from worldwide users every day. In this talk I will provide a basic introduction to how this technology works, and which linguistic knowledge it uses, if any. I will also explain why sometimes it does a fine job, and sometimes it fails embarrassingly.
‘Exploring the Cultural Contexts of Machine Translation’
Dr Marcus Tomalin
In recent years, translation has witnessed an unprecedented technological revolution. For many people, web-based software, such as Google Translate, is rapidly becoming the primary resource for obtaining rough-and-ready translations of given source-language texts. Pressing a button is much quicker and easier than patiently tussling with lexicons, conjugations, declensions, and the like. However, few ‘naïve users’ know how state-of-the-art machine translation systems work. This is unfortunate, since it is hard to evaluate the advantages, disadvantages, and significance of such tools without first understanding how they are constructed and trained, and how exactly they perform their automatic mappings from one natural language to another. Even a rudimentary familiarity with the principles of machine translation can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of such systems, and this in turn can help us evaluate their prominence in the modern world. Why, for instance, do they cope more successfully with news reports than poetry? And why is their output sometimes so sexist?
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Dr. Adrià de Gispert is a senior research scientist at SDL Research, as well as a senior research associate at the Engineering Department in the University of Cambridge, UK. His main research work is in the fields of Speech and Language Technologies and Computational Linguistics, with a specific focus on Statistical Machine Translation. He has published more than 30 major research papers on this field, and has contributed to the development of multiple state-of-the-art research and commercial machine translation systems. He is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
Dr. Marcus Tomalin’s s research interests focus upon different aspects of the analysis of natural language. His work in linguistics has explored the relationship between mathematics and linguistic theory. He has sometimes approached this topic from an historical perspective (for instance, exploring Leonard Bloomfield's knowledge of mathematics), while, at other times, he has concentrated upon analysing distinctive mathematical techniques present in contemporary linguistic theories (for instance, so-called recursive components). He is also interested in the theory and practice of translation, and has written at length about translation from languages such as Haida and French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A member of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the Cambridge University Engineering Department since 1997, he has been actively involved in fields such as automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, and machine translation. In his spare time, he is a Fellow and Senior Admissions Tutor at Downing College, Cambridge.
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
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