TRANSLATING AND THE COMPUTER 29 CONFERENCE, 29-30 November 2007, London A Conference organised by Aslib and supported by EAMT, BCS, IAMT, ITI, IoL, LISA, TILP
We are pleased to announce the keynote address at this year's conference: Translation Wikified: How will Massive Online Collaboration Impact the World of Translation? Alain Désilets, National Research Council of Canada Massively collaborative sites like wikipedia, YouTube and SecondLife are revolutionizing the way in which content is produced and consumed world wide. They are part of a broader wave of open collaboration that includes things like open-source software, blogs, Creative Commons licensing and free culture. These fundamentally collaborative technologies and paradigms are bound to have a profound impact on the way that content is not only produced, but also translated. In this talk, we will sample a number of translation related questions that naturally arise in this new frontier. For example, what does it mean to translate content that is constantly being edited collaboratively by a large community of anonymous authors? How might translators benefit from open, wiki-like translation resources? In a world where anyone can write and publish original content in their native language, will we need to cover more language pairs, and if so, how might Machine Translation technology help? Could massively collaborative technologies save freelance translators from extinction by allowing them to bid on parts of large contracts without giving up their autonomy and by allowing them to share expertise within the context of a world-wide community of practice? Will we see the emergence of a new breed of "amateur" volunteer translators and will this result in a de-skilling of the translation profession? How can organisations best leverage the collaborative energy of this new breed of translators? How do we ensure the quality of translations and translation resources in such a seemingly chaotic collaborative environment? Can massively collaborative technologies help save minority languages from extinction? Can teachers of translation take advantage of such technologies to provide students with real-life translation experience early on in their training? We will illustrate questions like those with real-life examples of projects and trends that are currently happening. Using those examples, we will show how mass collaboration technology sometimes introduces new problems, while in other cases it helps solve them or even creates exciting new opportunities and niches that did not exist before. Speaker Biography Alain Désilets is a Research Officer at the Institute for Information Technology of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), and an active member of the Language Technology Research Center, a joint initiative between the NRC, Université du Québec en Outaouais, and the Translation Bureau of Canada. For more than a decade, he has been doing research on applications of human language technologies (speech recognition, machine translation, bilingual text alignment and text mining), always with a strong emphasis on meeting genuine needs of end user. He is also very active in the area of collaborative wiki tools, and was general chair for the international WikiSym 2007 conference held in Montreal, Canada last October. He is co-founder of LOPLT, a multidisciplinary group of 8 researchers from NRC and Université du Québec en Outaouais that aims at better understanding the technological needs of professional translators by observing and interviewing them in action in their normal workplace. His latest work has focused on computer-assisted translation technology, with an emphasis on tools to help translators collaborate and share knowledge within world-wide communities of practice. Full details of the conference can be found at: www.aslib.com/conferences You will also find details of how to exhibit (we have two spaces left) or sponsor the event. Kind regards Nicole Adamides, ASLIB Training The Holywell Centre, 1 Phipp Street, London, EC2A 4PS Tel: 020 7613 3031 Fax: 020 7613 5080 www.aslib.com/training Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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