Human and Machine Intelligence

Since its inauguration in Copenhagen (2014), Translation in Transition has become a central meeting point for empirical translation studies in Europe through successive editions of the conference in Germersheim (2015), Ghent (2017), and Barcelona (2019). The fifth conference (TT5) will be held outside Europe, at Kent State University/USA, to be – as before – a forum of discussion focused on empirical research in the fields of translation and interpreting.

As in the previous iterations, TT5 provides a forum for discussion to learn more about how human translators exercise their skill cognitively and also how computer programs can be designed to help human translators, by automatically translating written text, by recognizing and translating spoken utterances or –more indirectly– by logging translation events and analyzing recorded process data.

The special focus of TT5 is on human and machine intelligence. In times of increasing machine intelligence, translation aides and translation technologies change at a rapid pace, fundamentally transforming the status of translation and the translation profession. TT5 aims at discussing the following questions: what are the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human translation performance? How can and do humans cope with developing machine intelligence and how can machines adapt to the human condition? What is the effect of technology on the translation process, performance, job satisfaction, the product and society?

Translation in transition: Between Cognition, Computing and Technology (TT1) in Copenhagen (2014), ended CRITT’s 5-year ‘world-class’ grant at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The fifth edition of Translation in transition: Human and Machine Intelligence (TT5) inaugurates the new location of CRITT@kent, where it expands to a new continent and to a new and a larger research environment.

Conference topics:

• translation process research
• cognition and translation
• reading processes (especially in translation)
• writing, revision and post-editing processes
• user and usage studies of machine translation, speech recognition and translation
• aspects of translation quality in human and machine translation
• computational modelling of human translation
• translation expertise, in people and in systems
• corpus studies in translation