TECHNOLOGIES FOR TRANSLATION AND POST-EDITING MOD.2

This is one of the complimentary courses within the Translation and Interpretation MA programme and is addressed to students of both curricula (English/Spanish/LIS and English/Chinese).
The main aim of the course is to provide students with key information about post-editing (referring to the ISO Standard currently available), enable students to extract specialised jargon from corpus analysis, and practise post-editing (with varying degrees of intervention on the raw MT output) and proof-reading.

Knowledge and competences
By the end of the course, students will have acquired knowledge of:
- the key principles of Corpus Linguistics
- the key contents of the ISO Standard 18587 on Post-editing
- the competences and skills to be developed and possessed by post-editors according to the ISO Standard 18587
- the main tools for machine translation (MT) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) (e.g. DeepL, GoogleTranslate, ChatGPT, MateCat, MateSub)

Applying knowledge and competences
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- retrice specialised jargon from corpus analysis
- use AntConc for corpus analysis
- carry out a corpus-driven translation from Italian into English
- carry out post-editing with varying degrees of intervention on the raw MT output
- proof-read specialised texts

Making judgements
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- select specific texts depending on the type of corpus to be assembled
- recognise potential translation equivalents by means of corpus analysis
- evaluate the extent to which MT output is appropriate/correct and or requires human translator intervention
- evaluate pros and cons of technologies for translation

Communication skills:
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- use the metalanguage relating to technologies for translation
- work in group effectively
- share doubts and difficulties

Learning skills:
By the end on the course, students will be able to feed and enrich their own knowledge and competences with trainining and practice

- Very good knowledge of the English language (at least C1 level)
- Excellent knowledge of Italian
- A positive attitude to IT
- A positive attitude to group work
- Critical thinking

The course will focus on the following topics:
1. Use of the AntConc software for analysing pre-assembled corpora for translation purposes
2. Post-editing: contents of the ISO Standard 18587
3. Use of different tools for machine and computer-assisted translation (e.g. ChatGPT, DeepL, MateCat, MatSub, etc.)
4. Project work: corpus-driven Italian>English translation
5. Post-editing (light post-editing, full post-editing, creative post-editing)
6. Proof-reading

All the needed content will be in the slides provided by the lecturer.
A few relevant academic paper and other useful readings will be published in the Moodle course.

The exam must be carried out in group and will be structured as follows:

1. Project work on post-editing (mark out of 30) - to be submitted via Moodle
2. Project work on corpus-driven translation (bonus up to 3 points) - to be submitted via Moodle (part of this project will be carried out in class)
3. Brief oral discussion of the project works (in group)

Assessment criteria
- critical analysis of the tool used and of the output produced (pros and cons, errors, etc.)
- Web-based research to be accurately documented (linguistic research, research of pictures, consulting sources, use of term databases etc.)
- ability to identify key issues and intervene in a clear and appropriate way

The course will be held in Italian and will consist of both lecture-based and interactive classes. For learning purposes, students are required to actively participate in the course-related activities.
All students are required to sign up to the Moodle course that will be published on the lecturer’s personal unive webpage and, for exam preparation, refer to the materials and activities that will be uploaded in Moodle on a weekly basis.

Italian

The contents of the course might be slightly modified depending on the needs of the class as well as on the relevant tools made available by the University.

written and oral