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EMT Blog
  • News article
  • 7 March 2023
  • Directorate-General for Translation
  • 2 min read

Teaching Contemporary Translation Practices through industry – academia collaboration and blogposting in the EMT classroom

By Parthena Charalampidou, Laboratory Teaching Fellow of Localisation and Multimodal Translation and teaching Translation at the Joint Postgraduate Studies Program 'Conference Interpreting and Translation', Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR)

Coloured words and numbers on a black computer screen

The present post describes a case of industry-academia collaboration between the students of EMT at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Logrus Global, USA  as well as the use of blogposting as a method of translator training enhancement.

During the third semester course Contemporary Translation Practices and more specifically in the unit devoted to post-editing, the issue of quality assessment was approached through a collaboration with an international translation company based in the U.S, Logrus Global https://logrusglobal.com. Through this collaboration students got the chance to annotate Machine Translation raw output from two different MT systems using the quality metric that the company has developed and thus, contribute to the control of the metric regarding the language pair English-Greek. The students also used human translations they had produced themselves in the previous semester (in the course Translation of Specialised Texts and Terminology Documentation I (EN-EL)) as reference translations. Students first got acquainted with the use of a specific quality metric before post-editing and then, checked the output quality of specific MT tools and made comparisons between the two and between each MT output and the human translation (golden standard).

The steps and methodology used in the context of this collaboration are shown in the poster that follows.

Poster describing the methods used in classroom
  • General publications
  • 8 March 2023
Thessaloniki Poster

 

During the same course (Contemporary Translation Practices) and in the unit devoted to marketing, students had the chance to work on their e-reputation by writing/translating articles related to translation and then uploading them to the EMT programme’s blog emtgr.wordpress.com created for the specific course by the instructor. Students were responsible for the quality of the article they submitted and had to promote both the article and the blog using their social media accounts. The inspiration came from a similar blog created by Prof. Rudy Loock, MasterTSM@Lille, for the master Traduction Spécialisée Multilingue  (TSM) at the University of Lille.

Screenshot of emtgr blog

Through the integration of real-life situations in the classroom EMT students were motivated to actively participate and show responsibility regarding the outcome of their work (error annotation for an international company and article/interview translation/writing for publication on a blog).  Among other initiatives taken by the EMT programme at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the specific course allowed students to get a glimpse of the market reality they were about to enter right before their internship in the following semester.

Details

Publication date
7 March 2023
Author
Directorate-General for Translation
Language
  • English
EMT Category
  • Activities of the EMT network
  • Pedagogical initiatives