Machine Translation and Human Creativity

Silvia Bernardini is professor of English linguistics and translation, and Dean of the Department of Interpreting and Translation  – DIT – University of Bologna. Her research interests are in the areas of corpus linguistics, technology for translation, and translator education.

Ester Dolei, PhD student at the Department of Interpreting and Translation – DIT - University of Bologna. Her research interests focus on neural machine translation systems and their application in the business world.

 

Federico Garcea is a research fellow at the Department of Interpreting and Translation  – DIT – University of Bologna. His research interests are in the areas of machine translation and computational linguistics applied to literary and artistic content. He previously worked as development manager for the Translator team at Microsoft Research. 

Federico Gaspari teaches English language and specialised translation at the Università per Stranieri "Dante Alighieri" in Reggio Calabria, where he is director of the Centro Linguistico d'Ateneo, and collaborates with the ADAPT Centre of Dublin City University on international research projects on translation technologies. After graduating in translation from the University of Bologna (Forlì campus), he obtained a PhD in machine translation from the University of Manchester. He has held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Manchester, Salford, Bologna and Macerata. His main teaching and research interests are in machine translation (quality assessment, post-editing, machine translation used by professional translators as a productivity tool), corpus linguistics, descriptive and linguistic variation of English, and applied Translation studies. 

Ana Guerberof-Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked more than twenty years in the translation/localization industry in roles that ranged from translator to operations manager. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing productivity, quality and experience; pre-editing and post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training and creativity and reading experience with different translation modalities.   

Lara Hölbling Matković was born in 1968 in London. She studied English and German languages and literatures and graduated from Zagreb University in 1992. She co-produced several theater festivals for children and the young (1997: Croatian ASSITEJ festival; 1998, 2000 and 2002: International Milk-Tooth Festival) and produced the Zagreb Literary Talks and the Poetry Festival of the Croatian Writers’ Association.

She translates plays, fiction and non-fiction, literary theory, popular science and children’s literature. She edits lexicography, children’s and YA literature, and has so far edited more than fifty books for three Croatian publishing houses (Novi Liber, Algoritam, ArTresor).

She wrote My First Croatian Dictionary: For Children and Grown-Ups (Moj prvi hrvatski rječnik: za djecu i odrasle), and received for it the Kiklop-Award for best children’s book in 2005. She is the recipient of the Annual Award of the Croatian Literary Translators’ Association in 2006 for her translation of Elizabethan World Picture (Elizabetinska slika svijeta). She made the IBBY Honor List in 2010 with her translation of Kevin Henkes’ novel Olive’s Ocean (Olivin ocean). She has been a member of the Croatian Literary Translators’ Association since 1997, serving on the Executive Board from 2004 to 2012, and again since 2018, of which two years (2010-2012) as President of the association, and two years (2018-2020) as Vice-president.

From 2016 to 2020 she was a member of the Executive Board of the Croatian Association of Audio-Visual Translators. She is also a member of the International Board of the Croatian Literary Translators’ Association and the Croatian representative in the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations - CEATL, where she also serves as Secretary General in her second term. 

Claudia Lecci graduated in Specialized Translation and Translation for the Publishing Industry at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (now Department of Interpreting and Translation – DIT - University of Bologna). She currently coordinates the modules "Computer-Assisted Translation & Web Localization" and "Machine Tranlsation & Post-Editing" of the MA in Specialized Translation and “Methods and Technologies for Interpreting” of the MA in Interpreting. She is an SDL Trados Authorized Trainer for SDL Trados Studio and SDL MultiTerm 2021.  

Kirsten Malmkjær is emeritus professor of translation studies at the University of Leicester. She is especially interested in translation theory – that is, in understanding the phenomenon that is translation, an interest that she has pursued throughout her academic career. In addition to teaching at Leicester, she has taught at the universities of Birmingham, Cambridge and Middlesex. Recent publications include the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics (2018), the collection of articles, Key Cultural Texts in Translation, co-edited with Adriana Serban and Fransiska Louwagie (John Benjamins 2018) and Translation and Creativity, Routledge (2020). Forthcoming are The Cambridge Handbook of Translation and Introducing Translation both for Cambridge University Press. With Sabine Braun, she edits the Cambridge Elements series on Translation and Interpreting. 

Anthony Pym is Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain; Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Extra-ordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His publications include Exploring Translation Theories, (Routledge, 2010), On Translator Ethics (Benjamins 2012),  Translation Solutions for Many Languages (Bloomsbury 2016) and What is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach, with Andrea Rizzi and Birgit Lang (Palgrave 2019).

Giovanna Scocchera has been a literary translator from English for over twenty years. In addition to translating, she revises other people's translations and conducts translation and revision workshops. In 2015 she obtained a PhD in Translation, Interpretation and Interculturality from the School of Languages and Literatures, Translation and Interpretation of Bologna (Forlì campus) and published her research work on editorial revision La revisione della traduzione editoriale dall’inglese all’italiano. Ricerca, professione, formazione, Aracne: Rome (2017). In 2018 she was awarded the Nini Agosti Castellani prize for her translation of C.E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings (Einaudi). 

Antonio Toral is Assistant Professor in Language Technology at the University of Groningen. He holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Alicante and has been researching in the field of Machine Translation (MT) since 2010. His research interests include the application of MT to literary texts, MT for under-resourced languages and the computational analysis of translations produced by machines and humans. He coordinated the Abu-MaTran project, which was flagged by the European Commission as a success story. Recently he has won the best paper award at MT Summit 2019 for his work on post-editese. 

Waltraud Kolb is Assistant Professor of Literary Translation at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. She studied translation (English, French, Portuguese/German) and holds a PhD in comparative literature. One focus of her research is on literary translation processes and machine translation in the literary field. She is also a professional translator and a member of the executive board of the Austrian Association of Literary Translators.