FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS:

Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (HiT-IT 2019)
http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/hit-it2019/

We are pleased to announce the Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology.
HiT-IT 2019 is a follow-up of the successful first edition of the workshop (HiT-IT 2017) which took place in Varna, Bulgaria in 2017 (http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/hit-it/).
HiT-IT2019 will be held in conjunction with the influential conference RANLP 2019 (http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2019/firstCfP.php).

*This year we welcome submissions from industry (translation agencies) and practitioners (translators and interpreters).*

HiT-IT seeks to act as a meeting point for (and invites) researchers working in translation and interpreting technologies,
practicing technology-minded translators and interpreters, companies and freelancers providing services in translation and interpreting
as well as companies developing tools for translators and interpreters.

Human translation and interpreting as well as Machine Translation (MT) (including Automatic Speech Translation) aim to solve the same problem
(i.e. translate from one language into another) but obtain somewhat different results. While human translation so far is largely preferred by businesses and individuals in terms of quality, it requires high cognitive efforts and a lot of time. MT is much faster and can process large amounts of textual data in no time,
but its results have obvious shortcomings for the average human.

The field of Translation Technology (TT) emerged with the aim to speed up and ease the translation process, and specifically,
to assist human translators and interpreters with their work. The field relies heavily on methods developed in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) (and Computational linguistics).
Typical examples are Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, electronic dictionaries, concordancers, spell-checkers, terminological databases, terminology extraction tools, translation memories, partial machine translation of template documents, speech recognition systems for automatic subtitling,
to name just a few.
However, quite often these tools do not address the actual needs of translation and interpreting professionals.

In turn, the NLP and MT fields make use of the knowledge and expertise of professional translators and interpreters in order to build and improve models for automatic translation –
e.g. by using parallel aligned human translations and speech interpretation corpora for machine learning, human evaluation of machine translation outputs and human annotations.

Most of the currently existing conferences are either focused too much on the automatic side of translation or concentrate largely on translators’ and interpreters’ professions.
HiT-IT addresses this gap by allowing the discussion, the scientific comparison, and the mutual enrichment of professionals from both fields.
HiT-IT 2019 addresses the development of translation tools and the experience translators and interpreters have with these tools as well as the development of machine translation engines, incorporating human (translators and interpreters’) expertise. The workshop also offers a discussion forum and publishing opportunity for professionals from the human translation and interpreting fields (e.g. translators including subtitlers, interpreters, researchers in translation and interpreting studies) and for researchers and developers working on translation and interpreting technology and machine translation, to hear the other side’s position and to voice their opinions on how to make translation technologies closer to what would be accepted by large audiences, by incorporating human expertise into them.
The workshop invites papers on the following four main themes, however submissions on similar themes/topics will also be considered:


User needs:
- analysis of translators’ and interpreters’ needs in terms of translation and interpreting technology
- user requirements for interpreting and translation tools
- incorporating human knowledge into translation and interpreting technology
- what existing translators’ (including subitlers’) and interpreters’ tools *do not* offer
- user requirements for electronic resources for translators and interpreters
- translation and interpreting workflows in larger organisations and the tools for translation and interpreting employed

Existing methods and resources:
- current developments in translation and interpreting technology
- electronic resources for translators and interpreters
- annotation for translation and interpreting technology
- crowdsourcing techniques for creating resources for translation and interpreting
- current advances in pre-editing and post-editing of machine translation
- human-informed (semi-)automatic generation of interlingual subtitles
- other technology for subtitling

Evaluation:
- (human) evaluation of translation and interpreting technology
- crowdsourcing techniques for evaluating translation and interpreting
- evaluation of discourse and other linguistic phenomena in (machine) translation and interpreting
- evaluation of existing resources for translators and interpreters
- human evaluation of neural machine translation

Other:
- position papers regarding how machine translation should be improved to incorporate translators’/interpreters’ expertise
- translation and interpreting technologies' impact on the market
- comparison between human and machine translation
- changes in the translators and interpreters’ professions in the new technology era especially as a result of the latest developments in Neural Machine Translation.

TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS:

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit:
- full papers describing original completed research (for researchers) or distinctive work experience (for practitioners),
- short papers presenting ongoing research ideas, ongoing practical work and demos of working systems.
Both theoretical ideas and practical applications are welcome. Position papers promoting new ideas, challenging the current status of the fields
and proposing how to take them forward are also encouraged.
In addition to the academic papers, we welcome companies and freelancers to share their working experience and practices (user papers).
The article format and the evaluation criteria for these academic and user papers will be different and will be announced in the Second Call for Papers.
There will be two categories of papers with two different submission deadlines: regular papers, reporting completed research or completed user studies;
and work-in-progress papers, describing work in progress, late breaking research, papers at a more conceptual stage,
and other types of papers that do not fit in the regular papers category.
All submissions will be reviewed by experts in the field and the best ones will be accepted for presentation at the workshop.
It is envisaged that the user papers will be shorter and less formal.

The workshop will also include a round table featuring discussion of how both fields can be of use to each other and invited talks.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Regular papers (academic + user):

- Submissions deadline: June 3rd, 2019
- Acceptance notifications: July 1st, 2019
- Camera-ready versions due: August 20, 2019
- Workshop date(s): 5 or 6 September 2019

Work in progress papers (academic + user):

- Submissions deadline: July 8th, 2019
- Acceptance notifications: July 29th, 2019
- Camera-ready versions due: August 20, 2019
- Workshop date(s): 5 or 6 September 2019

WORKSHOP CHAIRS:

Irina Temnikova (Sofia University, Bulgaria; irina.temnikova@gmail.com)
Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, UK; c.orasan@wlv.ac.uk)
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, UK; r.mitkov@wlv.ac.uk)
Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga, Spain; gcorpas@uma.es)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Anja Rütten (Conference Interpreter, Member of AIC, Germany)
Anna Zaretskaya (TransPerfect, Spain)
Bart Defrancq (Ghent University, Belgium)
Carla Parra (ADAPT Centre, SALIS, Dublin City University, Ireland)
Claudia Angelelli (Heriot-Watt University, UK)
Claudio Bendazzoli (Università Degli Studi di Torino, Italy)
Claudio Fantinuoli (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim, Germany)
David Orrego-Carmona (Aston University, UK)
Dragos Ciobanu (University of Leeds, UK)
Eleanor Cornelius (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)
Eleni Zisi (EL-Translations, Greece)
Eva Dolezalova (MemSource, Czech Republic)
Federico Gaspari (ADAPT Centre, Ireland)
Gabriela Gonzales (E-Trad, Argentina)
Haris Ghinos (ELIT Language Services, Greece)
Hendrik J. Kockaert (Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar)
Janice Jun Pan (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)
Joshua Goldsmith (EU and UN Accredited Conference Interpreter)
Joss Moorkens (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Juanjo Averallilo (HERMES Traducciones, Spain)
Lieve Macken (University of Ghent, Belgium)
Maja Popovic (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)
Manuel Herrandez (Pangeanic, Spain)
Marcello Federico (Amazon, USA)
Maria Kunilovskaya (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
María Mercedes Enríquez Aranda (University of Malaga, Spain)
Maria Stambolieva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia)
Maria Stasimioti (Ionian University, Greece)
Mark Shuttleworth (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)
Masaru Yamada (Kansai University, Japan)
Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Michael Ustaszewski (Universität Innsbruck, Austria)
Mina Ilieva (Mitra Translations, Bulgaria)
Nannan Liu (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Nieves Jiménez Carra (University of Malaga, Spain)
Omar Atari (University of Petra, Jordan)
Peter Reynolds (MemoQ, Hungary)
Pieter Demuytere (Televic, Belgium)
Pierrette Bouillon (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar)
Raisa McNab (Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd, UK)
Rozane Rebechi (University Rio Grande do Sur, Brazil)
Santanu Pal (Saarland University, Germany)
Sara Moze (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Sharon O’Brien (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Sheila Castilho (ADAPT Centre, Ireland)
Silvia Bernadini (University of Bologna, Italy)
Sin-Wai Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Stephen Doherty (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
Veronique Hoste (Ghent University, Belgium)
Verónica Pérez Guarnieri (Colegio de Traductores, Argentina)
Vilelmini Sosoni (Ionian University, Greece)
Yota Georgakopoulou (Athena Consultancy, Greece)
Yves Champollion (Wordfast, US/France)