#TranslatingEurope Forum

It took me a while to write this blog, but I finally I managed to find the time to sit down and resume my feelings and ideas about the Translating Europe Forum that was held on 27th and 28th of October 2016.

Everything simply started this summer, when my amazing professor Dragos Ciobanu kindly asked me if I was available for attending the forum... of course I WAS AVAILABLE! It had been incredible to know that I had been good enough to have the honour to represent the University of Leeds at such an amazing occasion.

To be honest I didn't know what to expect and most of all I didn't know what my role was in such an event.
Everything suddenly became clear when the whole thing started; as the email that I read endless times stated, it was an occasion for young professionals, professors and translation stakeholders to get together and know more about where the translation market is going, about which are the news and what could be done to improve the current situation both from a freelancer and a LSP's points of view. The most surprising bit was that students have been put on the same level of professors and professionals. I think that this approach helped us speak out loud a bit more and to actively participate at the discussions that have taken place. 

This very positive and forward looking environment has been the perfect background to discuss the main points that everybody is talking about now:

• MACHINE TRANSLATION, considering mainly statistical MT based on a corpus of texts. However, there are constant developments on neural MT and maybe a grammar-based MT.
• MACHINE TRANSLATION + TRANSLATION MEMORIES, such as CASMACAT and MATECAT and how the two have been developed for different uses and with different goals in mind.
• THE IMPORTANCE OF TERMINOLOGY, as monolingual and bilingual terminology extraction and how the two processes can be refined to obtain very high quality resources. Some sessions in particular offered reports that  may allow LSPs to understand which tool could be more useful than others. Also, the speech about how IATE will be "transferred" to IATE 2 and how to effectively manage terminology has been one of the most interesting subject of discussion.
• THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON TRANSLATORS and the question "Will technology replace human translators???". This issue has been discussed in several instances throughout the forum, however there is no meeting point. Some translators think the impact that technology is having now is considerable and in the future there will not be the need for human translators. Other (me included) think that we create technology for us and according to our needs, therefore we only need to make the most of it in order to make it work for ourselves.

Overall, this has been an amazing experience that has given me an insight of what being a young professional in a multicultural environment means, i.e. cool! I had to chance to know many new facets and aspects of the industry as well as meeting so many important and interesting people.

If you want to know more about the event, please click on this link:
 https://ec.europa.eu/info/events/translatingeurope_en 

If you would like to have a look at what's been tweeted just look for the ash tag #TranslatingEurope