Day Two of the 8th International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting is well underway. Prof. Andy Way opened today’s proceedings with his keynote entitled “The Importance of the Role of Translators in Machine Translation”.
His talk tracked the major developments in MT over the past 80 years, comparing rule-based and statistical approaches, and outlined current developments with particular interest for translators, and especially students of translation studies, focusing on topics for study, and future employment opportunities. He concluded with an eye to future developments in MT. [Slide can be found here].
Biography:
Prof. Andy Way
Director of Language Technology, Applied Language Solutions, UK
Prof. Andy Way is currently President of the European Association for Machine Translation (2009-) and President of the International Association for Machine Translation (2011-13). He is also the current Editor of the Machine Translation Journal (2007-). Andy Way has 25 years experience in Machine Translation R&D, first on the Eurotra MT project, and subsequently by building up his own world-leading group as Professor in Computing at DCU, where he graduated 17 PhD students and 11 MSc by Research students. In that time he brought in over €6 million in research funding, and was a principal investigator on the Centre for Next Generation Localization.
Andy acted as a consultant for Applied Language Solutions from October 2010, when they took over his jointly-owned company Traslan Teoranta. Andy joined ALS full-time in August 2011 as Director of Language Technology. ALS’ main activities are building in-house MT solutions for a large number of blue-chip companies, and developing SmartMATE, a self-serve portal for translators and LSPs to customize state-of-the-art SMT without having to train, tune, test or evaluate the system themselves. As well as DIY MT, SmartMATE allows TM integration and online synchronous post-editing and proofreading, all in one low-cost environment. Andy also coordinates ALS’ involvement in three FP7-funded projects: Bologna, SUMAT, and Moses Core.