Admission requirements
This course is open only to students registered for the Translation specialization.
Description
Translators have a wide variety of sources and tools that they can use in their work, including AI-driven technologies that are reshaping the profession. The problem is not that information is lacking, but that it is difficult to find because there is so much of it. The Translator’s Tools is a heuristics course in which students will learn how to find and use reference tools, including CAT (computer-assisted translation) tools, terminology management tools, corpora and machine translation, and how to conduct and write up translation-related research. The course also explores the role of large language models (LLMs) in translation workflows, focusing on interactive post-editing, reviewing, quality assessment and assurance. Through both theory and practice, students critically engage with AI-assisted translation tasks, learning how to adapt to the new technologies and workflows of the evolving translation industry.
Course objectives
- Use the most relevant IT applications, including the full range of office software, and adapt rapidly to new tools and IT resources having critically assessed their relevance and impact on their work practices
- Make effective use of search engines, corpus-based tools, data cleaning tools, text analysis tools, computer- assisted translation (CAT) and quality assurance (QA) tools, both cloud-based and offline
- Pre-process, process and manage files and other media/sources as part of the translation workflow, e.g., databases, translation memories and multimedia files
- Understand the basics of MT systems and large language models (LLMs) and their impact on the translation process and the profession, and integrate MT into translation workflows
- Post-edit MT output using style guides and terminology glossaries to maintain quality standards in AI-enhanced translation projects
- Assess the quality of MT output using automatic and human evaluation techniques
- Demonstrate ability to conduct and write up translation technology-related research
- Collaborate with peers in developing and assessing human and AI-enhanced translation workflows
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Independent work on the Translation Lab
Assessment method
Assessment
Written assignments:
Machine translation research paper (50%)
One in-class CAT-tool assignment (50%)
Weighing
Machine translation research paper (50%)
One in-class CAT-tool assignment (50%)
All components have to be at least 6.0.
Resit
There will be a resit opportunity for each of the course components. All components have to be at least 6.0.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
Rothwell, A., Moorkens, J., Fernández-Parra, M., Drugan, J., & Austermuehl, F. (2023). Translation Tools and Technologies (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003160793
Kenny, Dorothy. 2022. Machine translation for everyone: Empowering users in the age of artificial intelligence. (Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing 18). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6653406.
Koehn, P. (2020). Neural Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-machine-translation/7AAA628F88ADD64124EA008C425C0197
The course books are available open access online or at the university library. Print copies can be purchased at bookstores or online.
Additional reading materials will be made available on Brightspace.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Reuvensplaats