Teaching Machine Translation

Machine translation has become a key technology in present-day globalized communications scene, a truly cross-disciplinary technology which should not be used without a certain level of understanding. As a result, many universities and academic institutions teach courses on machine translation, both as graduate and as undergraduate courses. Courses may be aimed, on the one hand, at translation and linguistics majors, and, on the other hand, to computer science or computer engineering majors, but they may also be of interest to any person involved with information technologies in a multilingual setting (electronic commerce, localization, multilingual documentation, cross-language information retrieval). The cross-disciplinary nature of the discipline poses important challenges on instructors, who have to deal either with computer science and engineering students without an adequate background on linguistics and translation or with translation and linguistic majors without experience with computers. The existence of widely-spread preconceptions, fears, and expectations about machine translation, which interfere with the learning process, needs also addressing by instructors.

On the other hand, due to the growth in the internet, both commercial and experimental machine translation systems are more readily available than ever, and, if adequately used, may be very beneficial for education. The world-wide web may also be seen as the medium used for teaching, as it may naturally integrate real MT systems as part of the learning environment.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• why and to whom should MT be taught?
• teaching the theoretical background of MT: linguistics, computer science, translation theory
• addressing preconceptions about MT in the classroom
• the use of commercial MT programs in hands-on teaching
• teaching machine translation strategies to non-computer science majors
• web-based distance learning of MT
• teaching MT as a component of multilingual information resources and as a part of the entire documentation process
• MT education and industry: bridging the gap between academia and the real world
• teaching pre- and post-MT skills to MT users
• teaching MT-related techniques: translation memory, alignment tools, terminological databases, use of corpora, etc.
• teaching MT evaluation
• building modules or `toy' MT systems in the laboratory
• experiences on the evaluation of MT instruction

The working language of the workshop will be English.