Translating Europe Forum 2015 – Debate on language technologies

Translating Europe Forum 2015 (European Commission, Brussels, 29-30 October 2015)

Session “The role of translation for multilingualism” (30 oct., 10.00; ~100 attendants)
Timed participation list of the debate on language technologies during the session
MLLP @ Translating Europe Forum 2015

Jorge Civera and Gonçal Garcés (3rd and 4th from the right on the 2nd row from the top) attending the session on “The role of translation for multilingualism” at Translating Europe Forum 2015 (Picture source: European Commission)

Moderator: Konrad Fuhrmann (EC, DG Education and Culture)
Speakers:
  • Panagiotis Alevantis (EC, DG Translation)
  • Zoe Moores (UK, translator, expert in respeaking)
  • Judit Sereg (Hungary, translator, expert in audiovisual translation)

Participating from the audience: Gonçal Garcés Díaz-Munío and Jorge Civera Saiz (MLLP research group, Universitat Politècnica de València)

Watch the session’s video at https://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/translating-europe-forum-2015-jenk-30-10 (debate on language technologies from 39.40; available in English, French and German)

Timed participation list:

  • 18.00 – 22.30 Panagiotis Alevantis: Comments on multilingualism and translation in EU policies towards 2020.
  • 19.47 – 22.30 Panagiotis Alevantis: Mention of the European Commission’s commitment on language technologies
  • 39.40 Gonçal Garcés (MLLP): Participation in the session’s open discussion about how this is an excellent time to apply language technologies in more and different ways.
  • 42.12 Konrad Fuhrmann and Gonçal Garcés (MLLP): The moderator enquires whether the final quality of the texts is guaranteed through human intervention. Answer (in short): yes.
  • 43.12 Konrad Fuhrmann: The moderator introduces the topic of the situation of language technologies as regards less-spoken languages.
  • 43:41 Judit Sereg: Expresses opinion that there is still no machine translation that works well with Hungarian.
  • 44.50 Panagiotis Alevantis: On how large enterprises (Microsoft, Google) accumulate data and technology in a way that makes competition difficult in the field of language technologies.
  • 48.20 Zoe Moores: On the lack of support for Welsh in commercial speech recognition software.
  • 48.56 Gonçal Garcés (MLLP): On the importance of having adequate data (corpora); on how researchers don’t always have access to all corpora; and how, nevertheless, for less-spoken languages researchers are managing to obtain better and better results even with smaller corpora.

Read the MLLP’s comments on Translating Europe Forum 2015 here. Visit the Translating Europe Forum 2015 website here.