On Dec. 13th, MTI Center of School of Foreign Languages, RUC, held an online lecture “Machine Translation: Ecosystem, Challenges, and Solutions” as part of its series lectures. Dragos Ciobanu, professor of computational terminology and machine translation at the Center for Translation Studies in University of Vienna, is the keynote speaker. Professor Zhu Yuan, Director of MTI Center, hosted the lecture, joined by teachers and students from MTI center and other universities.
Professor Ciobanu specializes in the application of machine translation, voice technology, CAT, and other language-related technologies. His research group focuses on voice technology in translation, proofreading and post-editing, application of translation technologies, and translation technology in teaching. During the lecture, he introduced the current development of machine translation and future challenges to encourage translation learners to sharpen their skills and find their areas of expertise. Professor Ciobanu also noticed some limitations of machine translation. For example, acronym translation tends to be wrong, key information may sometimes be omitted, and synonym replacement is inaccurate, etc. Priming Effect is also mentioned in the lecture to explain its limitation on post-editing, which means the editor will be more or less impacted by the translation version provided by machine. He also explained the working principle, application and potential of neuromachine translation.
At the end of the lecture, Professor Ciobanu answered questions posed by attendees. Professor Zhu Yuan thanked Professor Ciobanu for his sharing and encouraged MTI students to embrace the inevitable trend of translation technology application and explore further in machine translation and man-machine collaboration.