How to teach translation technologies Anthony Pym

11.15 – 12.45: A teaching experiment Plan of attach 9.30 – 11.00: Syllabus design 11.15 – 12.45: A teaching experiment 15.00 – 16.30: Teaching subtitling? 16.30 – 18.

BA, MA, short-term certificate, in-house? Which technologies? Who, when, why, how? BA, MA, short-term certificate, in-house? Which technologies? How many hours? In a separate course or as part of a general course? At the beginning or the end of the program? How many students in your ideal class? What hardware and software do they ideally have? (Their own? The institution’s? PCs and Macs?

Tarragona Masters in Professional Translation, from 2000 Where I speak from: Tarragona Masters in Professional Translation, from 2000 Introduction to translation technologies (3 ECTS) Introduction to subtitling (3 ECTS) Practicum and Research courses at Monterey, 2007-2015 BA course in Translation Technologies, 2014-16 (6 ECTS) Master of Translation, Melbourne, 2017 Translation Studies Workshop (6 ECTS)

What other programs teach? What “industry” and “the market” want? What to teach? What you were taught? What other programs teach? What “industry” and “the market” want? What your students want? What will give your students a competitive advantage? How to learn? What you don’t know.

Will machines replace translators? What students want to know Will machines replace translators? Which translation tools are most useful for translators? What new forms of translation will new technologies encourage? Pym, Anthony, and Ester Torres Simón. 2016. Designing a course in Translation Studies to respond to students’ questions”, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 10(2).

Is post-editing SMT more efficient than translating from scratch? Do you know these things? Is post-editing SMT more efficient than translating from scratch? Is pre-editing SMT more effective than post-editing? Should always apply your client’s TM 100% matches? Should you translate fast then revise slowly, or vice versa? Should you revise a translation with or without looking at the start text? Should you translate into L2? Can SMT help you work into L2? Will SMT replace human translators?

What activities for students? How many hours? How would you teach this? Translators reveal their favorite online toolshttps://inboxtranslation.com/blog/professional-translators-reveal-free-tools/ Which tools? What activities for students? How many hours?

Pym (2009): “lousy experiments” in the multilingual practicum How do you teach what you don’t know? Juliane House (1986, 2000): students translate in pairs or small groups (“translation in and as interaction”) for think aloud protocols and real learning processes. Pym (2009): “lousy experiments” in the multilingual practicum Bowker (2016): “gamification” as a pedagogical strategy to engage students in speed training.

Why don’t we know these things?

Development in 1980s, replacing work on MT. Why don’t we know these things? Development in 1980s, replacing work on MT. First commercial use from 1990 (under the name of CAT tools). Mid 1990s: second generation, includes linguistic analysis. 2002: TMX, developed by LISA. 2007: Moses do-it-yourself MT. 2009: Google Translator Toolkit, and other integrations of statistical MT. 2010: Wordfast Anywhere and other web-based platforms. 2012: In-house MT systems 2016: Neural MT … but they will all be different in five years’ time.

Integrating machine translation Postediting Things to learn Translation memories Integrating machine translation Postediting Pre-editing (controlled language) Integrating speech recognition Integrating terminology management Project management Subtitling … and anything they want to learn!

Teach people to experiment. Teach teams to experiment. So: Teach people to experiment. Teach teams to experiment.

A teaching space

Change the hypothesis following the test. Go to step 1 again. Basic empiricism: Admit you don’t know. Formulate the problem as a proposition that can be tested (a hypothesis). Test it. Report the results. Change the hypothesis following the test. Go to step 1 again.

1. Voice only (no writing allowed, no computers) Testing technology: Working in groups of 4 or 5, as far as possible, invent two longish English-language sentences where one is context-dependent and the other is context independent.  Have both these sentences translated into one language, then back into English, then into another language, and then back to English. The sentence pairs (both sentences traveling together in each case) must make this trip using three different technologies: 1. Voice only (no writing allowed, no computers) 2. Pen-and-paper only (folded over each time, as described below) 3) Google Translate.

Testing technology: Hypothesis 1: The more powerful the technology, the more stable the messages. Hypothesis 2: The context-independent sentences will be more stable than the context-dependent messages, under all conditions. Working in groups, please write a short report of what happened, and why you think it happened. 

Testing technology:

What the professor knows:  

The MT time trial: Please translate the following text for publication in Wikipedia.  Group A should translate just using Internet reference sources.  Group B should feed the text through Google Translate (http://www.google.com/translate_t#) then post-edit the output.  Since we are interested in how long these processes take, work at what you consider your normal pace. You will be stopped after 15 minutes.

The MT time trial:

Use of MT with directionality TM vs. MT postedited … Other experiments on: Use of TM (+/- MT) Use of MT with directionality TM vs. MT postedited …

In times of change, there is no authoritative “best practice.” Summary: In times of change, there is no authoritative “best practice.” We must all learn to experiment.