Students in York University’s Master in Translation Studies program at Glendon College are hosting the 11th annual Graduate Student Conference in Translation Studies on March 14. The single-day multilingual event, titled “Facing the Future – Translation and Technology,” will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Glendon Campus (2275 Bayview Ave., Toronto). Keynote speaker Sharon O’Brien will make a presentation via video conference. The event will also feature the work of students in the form of paper and poster presentations.
Into the second decade of the 21st century, technology continues to play an increasing role in translation processes and translator environments. What is translatable or not translatable through the mediation of machines is a central question heading into the era of neural translation and artificial intelligence. At the same time, questions emerge around whether the existing models of collaborative translation, crowd-sourcing, machine translated corpora and cloud-based Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools are leading towards a new era of multi-modal plurality or to a fragmented dystopia where quality becomes a casualty. Conference attendees will be invited to consider whether the interaction of human and machine in present and future translation ecologies is a harbinger of an enlightened post-humanism or a problematic process that favours disembodied networks, algorithmic decision-making and unsustainable growth in a time of runaway climate change and environmental degradation.
Sharon O’Brien
Keynote speaker Sharon O’Brien is a professor of translation studies at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. She obtained a PhD in 2006 on the topic of “Controlled Language and Post-Editing Effort” (Irish Research Council Scholarship). Prior to this, she was awarded a master of arts for research on “Language for Special Purposes, Text Linguistics and Machine Translation” (1993 – EU-funded) and a bachelor of arts (honours) in applied languages (translation, French and German). Between 1995 and 1999 she was a language technology consultant in the localization industry. She has coordinated a Horizon 2020 EU-funded RISE project called “INTERACT” – The International Network in Crisis Translation. She has been a funded investigator (Science Foundation Ireland) in the ADAPT research centre for more than 10 years, where her focus has been on human factors and translation technology. Her teaching focuses on language technologies, research methods and translation.
Conference attendees will have the opportunity to enter a free CAT Tool Licence raffle.
Those wishing to attend the conference can register online. Additional information can be found on the conference website. A calendar of events hosted by Glendon can be found on the college’s website.