The Wider Implications of Machine Translation: Theories, Predictions and Practices

Date: 16-Jun-2023 - 16-Jun-2023
Location: Neuchâtel + online, Switzerland
Contact: Sara Cotelli Kureth
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://www.unine.ch/cdl/home/colloque.html

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics

Meeting Description:

Machine translation (MT) has become an intrinsic part of our work and academic life in general. A recent survey (Delorme Benites et al. 2021) has revealed that it is a ubiquitous tool at Swiss universities, used by everyone from academic support staff, through teaching staff and researchers to students. Research on MT literacy (Bowker & Buitrago Ciro 2019) has shown the importance of discussing the tool with users and sharing information with them.
Numerous attemps to include MT in the language classroom have now been made all over the world (see some recent examples in Vinall &Hellmich 2022) and scientists have highlighted a series of problems with MT outpus: bias, machine translationese, difficulty to post-edit, false fluency, etc. (de Clerc et al. 2021; Loock & Léchauguette 2021).

This international conference aims to gather international researchers from different fields working on MT (translation, corpus linguistics, second-language acquisition, teaching methods, etc.), members of various Swiss project teams focusing on MT and language centre directors and teachers to discuss these issues at a theoretical and practical level.

The first day will focus primarily on language teaching and learning and will explore how to help learners develop a good MT literacy, with three short plenaries and discussion groups. It will only be possible to attend this first day in presence. On the second day, experts will share their take on the topic (see confirmed speakers below) and a poster session will provide doctoral students, language teachers and researchers to share their project (see programme on the website).

This two-day conference is hybrid but only the second day (June 16) is open to the wider public.

Confirmed speakers: Luisa Bentivogli (BFK); Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa); Catherine Perris & Raphaël Perrin (Pädagogische Hochschule St Gallen); Dorothy Kenny (Dublin City University); Emily Hellmich & Kimberly Vinal (University of California) and Masaru Yamada (Rikkyo University, Tokyo).