Our first time at SATT!

by Yannis Nistas, Language Lead at Commit Global

The 6^th edition of the School of Advanced Technologies for Translators (SATT) took place on September 14-15 in Milan, Italy, on the premises of the International University of Languages and Media (IULM). It was attended by 120 participants, with 20% of them coming from abroad. Also, more than 50% of the participants work in the language industry.

Organized by the Bruno Kessler Foundation, this year’s school revolved around Machine Translation (MT) and other advanced technologies for translators, with lectures and labs spanning across two days, and speakers coming from the realms of research, academia, and the language industry itself. The first day was dedicated to lectures, whereas on the second day we received hands-on training in the university labs.

The keynote lectures were given by Sharon O’Brien and Renato Beninatto. The former, coming from the academia, tried to include MT and the skills associated with it into different translation competence models, and set some food-for-thought questions about how to fit MT in the training of translators and how to future-proof their careers. The latter, an industry veteran with extraordinary communication skills, provided us with an overview of the translation technology landscape with particular reference to developments in MT. His lecture was enhanced by personal experiences as well as tips for translators he shared with us.

Researchers Marco Turchi and Luisa Bentivogli introduced us to MT and MT quality evaluation respectively. Turchi gave us a detailed presentation of how Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems work and drew comparisons on the performance of the two approaches. Bentivogli discussed about the importance of MT quality evaluation in deciding whether to use MT or not, and which system to select. She also described the various evaluation methods along with their pros and cons.

Industry people Tony O’Dowd, Laura Rossi and Konstantin Savenkov talked about KantanMT, a use case of MT in patents, and MT evaluation from an industry perspective respectively. All three lectures provided useful insights around MT.

The lecture day came to an end with a panel discussion among Renato Beninatto (moderator), Diego Cresceri, Tony O’Dowd, Laura Rossi, Paloma Valenciano (panelists). All active industry professionals shared their points of view about what skills translators should possess in our highly technologized industry.

During the labs we had the opportunity to attend hands-on courses on SDL Trados Studio 2019, MateCat, Smartcat, BootCat and MultiTerm, as well as focus on MT post-editing requirements and practical tips. I attended a lab on post-editing with Smartcat (led by Diego Cresceri), and another one on the use of such terminology tools as BootCat and MultiTerm (led by Claudia Lecci).

Overall, I enjoyed both days of the SATT 2018, was impressed by the passion of all my colleagues for our job, was excited to meet interesting people from our industry, and got to know as much of the wonderful city of Milan as I could on foot!

Congratulations to all those involved in the school’s organization!

I am looking forward to attending the SATT 2019 edition!