Turn Machine Translation from Foe to Ally

This course explains how translators, LSPs and project managers can turn machine translation (MT) from a dreaded foe into a powerful ally. By learning the strengths and weaknesses of this much talked about but little understood technology, you will be able to assess if, why and how you could use MT as part of your business, depending on your language pairs, specialization areas and type of clients.
The main approaches to MT system design are presented in a non-technical accessible way, including the well-established rule-based architectures and the increasingly popular statistical and hybrid approaches, which rely on parallel corpora and translation memory databases. You will be alerted to the key factors to consider when assessing the actual potential and the limitations of MT, balancing the pros and cons of introducing it into your own translation workflows, especially with regard to the initial investment and its expected return.

- Translators starting in the industry who want to develop up-to-date professional skills
- Experienced professionals (both freelance and in-house) wishing to explore the potential of MT
- Translation project managers
- LSPs and translation agencies
- Localization vendors

In this course you will:

- understand the principles behind how MT systems work, covering rule-based, statistical and hybrid systems
- learn how to plan the preparation of the resources required to build MT systems using well-established open-source development platforms
- familiarize yourself with the key variables to consider when deciding if/how/why you could use MT, depending on your own language pairs, specialization areas and clients

- Interest in understanding how MT works and how it can play a role in professional translation
- English as one of your working languages (source or target)
- Experience in technical/specialized translation is desirable
- Familiarity with CAT tools (especially translation memory software) is an advantage, but not essential

- Recent evolution and latest developments in MT
- Main approaches to MT system design: rule-based, statistical and hybrid
- Challenging linguistic and translation-related phenomena for MT
- Issues to consider when incorporating MT into your translation workflow
- Integration of MT and CAT tools (in particular translation memory software)
- Current trends and future prospects in MT

Price: 18.00 USD
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Participation fee includes unlimited access to the recording and handouts provided by the trainer.

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Follow the link on the top right corner as suggested here.

Where can I find a certificate of attendance?

A certificate of attendance can be issued upon training completion and as per your request. A certificate of attendance can be downloaded at http://www.proz.com/profile/?show_mode=standard#trainings

Federico Gaspari    View feedback | View all courses

Bio: Federico Gaspari is associate professor of English linguistics and translation studies at the University for Foreigners ‘Dante Alighieri’ of Reggio Calabria (Italy), where he is coordinator of the two-year Masters-level Programme in ‘Interpreting and Cross-Cultural Mediation Studies’ and director of the ‘Dante Alighieri’ University Language Centre. Since 2010 he has been a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Dublin City University (Ireland), where he has worked on 4 European research projects focusing on machine translation evaluation (CoSyne, QTLaunchPad, MLi and currently TraMOOC). After graduating in translation studies from the University of Bologna at Forlì (Italy) he completed an MSc and a PhD in machine translation at the University of Manchester (UK) and has held lecturing and research positions at the Universities of Manchester, Salford, Bologna at Forlì and Macerata. His teaching and research interests include translation technologies (with a special focus on machine translation, post-editing and translation quality evaluation), technical and specialised translation, translation theory, corpus linguistics, corpus-based translation studies and English linguistics. He has published widely on these subjects and is a regular speaker at international conferences on these topics.