T 3 in the Language Industries: Today, Translation, Technology

Abstract

presentation New profiles in the language industry have emerged dealing with translation, terminology, text mining, interpreting, post-editing, subtitling, copywriting, localization, accessibility and new forms of communication and content production (Álvarez Álvarez and Ortego Antón, 2020). Nor only technology, but also virtual environments have become of the essence for content managers and language service providers (LSP): virtual environments for professional networks, collaborative platforms, virtual desktops, speech-to-text solutions, cloud services, cloud-based machine translation, etc. as well as other, non-virtual solutions oriented to meet multilectal communication needs (Marshman, 2014; Sin-Wai, 2015; Kenny, 2017; O’Hagan 2019; among others). Technology is not only conditioning the way language professionals work today, but it is also creating new opportunities in the way of emerging niches for their services, and, therefore, challenging academia to cater for new professional profiles. Changes in human-computer interaction, steering new developments in the language industry, impose new training solutions for translators’ education, contents, and scenarios to ensure the efficient education of professionals-to-be. In this paper we report on FOIL, an EU-funded project developing online training for the language industries that combines technology-savvy industry expertise with cutting-edge Translation Studies didactics to design a flexible, modular layout of contents informed by language industry needs. One of the foci of attention in this development is that of how professionals and trainees envision and experience technology –both as a tool in and of itself and as an environment where LSPs workflow is embedded. As such, we will devote especial attention to incorporating new trends in translation and interpreting technologies, the impact of these trends in new applications and tools, and their integration in the workflow (PE, MT, automatic speech, learning AI systems), as well as their regulation in industry-relevant standards and best practices. Ethical considerations will be brought to bear in the context of a technology driven landscape where ownership and rights over content are often vague. While present in all modules in the project, technology-related contents will be specifically addressed in the module “Translation Environment Tools” comprising corpora, text mining, terminology management, CAT tools, machine translation, post-editing, localization, and web design.