"The Ghost in the Translation Machine: Charting Language Proficiency, Exploring Technology, and Making Translators Fit for a Digital Age (MC LinguaTech)"

In line with one of the European Commission’s main priorities of the decade to create ‘A Europe fit for the Digital Age’ and the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027), and responding to recent technological innovation, the general objective of the project is to integrate practical implications and applications from the constantly evolving field of (neural) machine translation (NMT) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into a language competence evaluation standard and a language acquisition pedagogy fine-tuned for translators of the future.
Initially, LinguaTech will develop a thorough understanding of the additional language (i.e., foreign/second language, AL) competence of translators as language experts. In view of the of recent advancements in language technologies, this development should be tailored to the requirements of NMT post-editing and supported by recent innovations in GenAI. Professional translation is a much more complex cognitive task than predicting the next sequence of characters in a string based on prior (and often limited in scope and language coverage, as well as occasionally biased and incorrect) text-based training data. Thus, expecting GenAI to replace human translation in all use-cases carries several ethical and practical concerns. On the other hand, however, constant development of NMT and GenAI brings valuable opportunities that should be exploited provided the risks are carefully mitigated. Essentially, the project will provide insight, tools and guidelines that will allow translators’ AL teachers to blend the latest language technology developments into their training, and thus make their students better able to meet the linguistic demands of NMT post-editing (PEMT).