Call for Papers

Background and aim of LTHT

Language technologies have advanced greatly for the past several decades, and are being incorporated into many aspects of communication activities and in human society. In the area of translation, the use of translation memories is now a sine qua non for commercial translation services. Also, machine translation (MT) is incorporated into the human translation process and post-editing of MT outputs (PEMT) is an established practice, at least for some language pairs. Outside the translation industries, a growing number of people are taking advantage of online MT systems to access content on the network provided in languages the command of which they do not have.

With the advancement of language technologies, including the enhanced MT quality and related multilingual processing, the use of language technologies in human translation or multilingual communication is expected to continue with accelerated impetus.

There are, however, many issues that should be addressed for the potential of language technologies such as MT to be fully exploited in human translation activities. Below are some of the issues widely recognized in NLP researchers, translation researchers, translators, and/or translation industries:

• What are the factors of MT systems to be used by humans (by lay people, by translators, or by language service providers (LSPs))? The use of MT by humans depends not just on the "performance" as measured in the MT research community (such as BLEU), but also critically on user-centered factors, such as adaptability of systems to the human working model.
• How can MT developers and vendors adapt their system to the fine-grained needs of human translators? It is often said that there is no single "universally" best MT. Some are better for translating specific text types than others, while some are better for specific "phases" of translation such as the choice of natural phrasal expressions, etc.
• What is the position and status of language technologies in the human translation workflow? While Translation Memories (TMs) and PEMT are established tools among professional and volunteer translators, crowdsourcing with non-professionals rely essentially on online platforms. Can language technologies be incorporated into human translation process in wider and more varied ways?

These issues inevitably lead us to the reflection and reconsideration of various aspects of human translation activities, e.g.,

• What is the area of translation (in terms of role, of text types, etc.) within which human translators continue to play a dominant role, and why? How can language technologies support human translators in this area?
• What are the essential translator competences in the era of human-machine collaboration in translation processes? How can translators acquire such competences?
• What is the relationship between authoring, translation, and delivery in human language process? Can we design language technologies that can be more effectively incorporated into this process, potentially transforming it?

The consideration of human-related factors in turn leads us to the contemplation of the potential of language technologies from wider perspective and enables us to examine the possible use of wider range of language technologies that are not limited to MT and multilingual processing.

The aim of the workshop on "Language Technologies and Human Translation" is to bring together NLP researchers, industry users of MT technologies, practitioners in LSPs, translation researchers, and translators to discuss issues related to language technologies and its real and potential impact on human translation and translation industries.

Topic of interest

We invite original papers on the following topics, but also welcome other related ideas.

• requirement for MT technologies from the point of view of use by LSPs, individual translators and lay people, e.g., what is the determining factors for people to use or not use MT?
• evaluation of MT, from the point of view of usability of translation services in the social sphere, i.e., what is "good" MT for social use?
• the relationship between human translators and MT, e.g., how can MT systems better complement the skills of human translators, how does the use of MT change human translation activities, and how do changes in human language activities promote the better use of MT and related technologies?
• range of language technologies in the human translation process, not limited to MT and multilingual processing, e.g., how can language technologies support authoring and pre-editing to maximize the effect of human or machine translation?
• human factors, i.e., what is the required competence for human "translators" to fully take advantage of language technologies, is it essentially the same as traditional translators' competence?

The workshop submissions are open to wide range of researchers and practitioners with different backgrounds and approaches, for instance, NLP researchers, MT developers, translation researchers, translators, LSP managers, etc. We emphasize to bring together researchers and practitioners with different backgrounds at this workshop.

Important dates

• May 22, 2017: Call for paper
• June, 2017: Opening of the submission website
• July 3, 2017: Paper submission deadline
• July 11, 2017: Paper submission deadline (extended)
• July 31, 2017: Notification of acceptance
• August 14, 2017: Camera-ready PDF due
• September 18, 2017: Workshop

Contact: ltht2017@googlegroups.com