Keynote speeches by Tetyana Struk from Ukraine and Prof. Michael Cronin from Trinity College Dublin among highlights of #2022TEF

Source : depositphotos.com

What a pleasure it was to participate in the 2022 Translating Europe Forum (#2022TEF) over the internet a few days ago. I had already the chance to attend the event at the Conference Centre Charlemagne Building (CHAR) in Brussels in 2015 and several times remotely online over the last few years. Each time, it has turned out to be an inspiring and stimulating international event (participants from over 100 countries this year) and a truly enriching experience.

#2022TEF: ACCESS FOR ALL Going beyond translating text was held from Nov. 9th to 11th. I closely followed the opening session online from my cosy place in Sart-Eustache, Belgium on the evening of Nov. 9th. Aminda Leigh (moderator and translator at AMROS Media Solutions) as well as Anya Sitaram (executive producer, communications consultant and conference moderator at Rockhopper MediaOpening) took the floor and presented the program of the three-day forum. They informed participants that more than 40% of them were under age 35, which shows how much young generations seem interested in the language translation industry and its trends and novelties. Welcome was then addressed by Johannes Hahn (European Commissioner for Budget and Administration). He highlighted the crucial role of translation and the richness of multilingualism in our community. He also insisted on the fact that it is important to write clear and concise documents or produce accessible records nowadays. The very intereactive and hybrid form of #2022TFE (live in Brussels or online, or available for viewing on demand on YouTube) shows that accessibility has been taken into account.

In today’s world with many people feeling apprehensive about the future, the first speech by Ukrainian translator Tetyana Struk was particularly moving and inspiring. Mrs. Struk explained how much the war in Ukraine has changed her life as a translator. Translating in a situation of crisis is extremely challenging. Mrs. Struk told us that the prerogatives of a translator in a situation of war are suddenly foremost human and not financial at all. The need to help prevails. She explained how her life as a CEO has changed since the start of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the job of most Ukrainian translators has been challenged on various aspects since then : time, work conditions, emotions, secondary trauma, 24/7 work, planning, etc. A standing ovation by the #2022TEF attendees in Brussels proved how touching and moving Tetyana Struk’s talk truly was on Nov. 9th.

We could then follow a panel discussion moderated by Aminda Leigh and involving Nicolas Beckers, (head of the language service at ARTE), Dragos Ioan Ciobanu (Professor of computational terminology and machine translation at the University of Vienna, Austria), Amalie Foss (freelance translator and President at Audiovisual Translators Europe) and Gian Maria Greco (senior research fellow in translation - accessibility expert at University of Macerata, Italy). Members of the panel talked about ways to convey meaning between languages, possibilities to switch from translating text-to-text to speech-to-text translation, key changes and challenges in the profession today, speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies improving accessibility for diverse audiences, etc. A few sentences and thoughts during the panel discussion were pretty emphatic. Gian Maria Greco, for instance, explained that “diversity is part of human nature”. He said that “we, as linguists or translators, need specifications since we have specific needs nowadays”. Focusing on new technological tools that could help the translators or the interpreters, Dragos Ioan Ciobanu warned that “when it’s free, it basically means that you are the product.”

I could not attend any of the online presentations on Thursday, Nov. 10th but was well connected on the morning of Friday, Nov. 11th (on Armsitice Day) as from 9:00 AM to enjoy the online presentation by Elina Lahdenranta, service development specialist at Lingsoft, one of Finland’s leading language companies which offers agile translation, subtitling and transcription services as well as diverse speech recognition and text analytics solutions. Mrs. Lahdenranta offered a quick overview of Lingsoft’s most useful commonly used translation tools with practical demonstrations.

I eagerly awaited the keynote speech of the day and was certainly not disappointed. Entitled The power of words, the tremendous speech by Professor Michael Cronin (Trinity College Dublin) focused on how translation shaped history. Prof. Cronin explained that the language and translation industry, just like our society, evolved through time : it moved from an ethnocentric approach in the 1980s to a geocentric perspective (altogether with trends like internationalization and/or localization in the business world) from the mid-80s to the 90s and eventually to today’s terracentric type of translation. The current terracentric approach concentrating on resource consciousness, mobility issues, post-holocene governance, range and idioms rivets the translation industry nowadays. Prof. Cronin illustrated his fantastic keynote speech with several book covers like L’âge des transitions by Pascal Chabot, Rewire by Ethan Zuckerman, The Globotics Upheaval by Richard Baldwin, Non-human Nature in World Politics by Joana Castro Pereira and André Saramago, Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Range – Why Generalists triumph in a specialized World by David Epstein, Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, En attendant les robots by Antonio A. Casilli, etc. The list of books is a very nice source of ideas for future Christmas gifts... As Prof. Michael Cronin put it, most people on social media post, react or address in their own language which makes the social network look like a tool tending towards provincialization. He also spoke about supply-side ecology and demand-side solutions for climate change mitigation related to the translation business. Translation has indeed an ecological cost. You sell more and more goods, products and services to achieve translations nowadays. Therefore, is translation in the gaming industry for example a real priority? In the current age, what kind of translation has a better ecological efficiency? Those are particular issues of current concern indeed... Prof. Cronin warned the audience that we should also keep in mind that slavery was the most lucrative business in the past and that we should avoid this situation again. He nevertheless always remained optimistic through s whole speech. “You still have to believe”, he said. He also insisted on the fact that we, translators, should make all we can in order to prevent digital provincialism from happening in the future. He even addressed the idea of interspecies communication and translation which might not be so futuristic or related to science-fiction anymore…

The speech of Prof. Michael Cronin at #2022TEF
was very inspiring

After Prof. Cronin’s speech, two more panel discussions were on the program: a first one entitled Industry insights : people, data and quality which turned out to be a machine vs. human translation debate and a last one with John O’Shea (chairperson of FIT Europe), James Hurrell (head of content and localization, BBC Studios), Britta Aagaard (chief business officer, Semantix), Adrian Probst (English/French to Swiss German translator and content creator at Freelanceverse) and Rudy Loock (University of Lille, France) who talked about accessibility as well as about the recent developments and technologies on which it is worth keeping an eye. At the end of this final panel discussion, the excellent moderator Aminda Leigh selected one of my questions that I had previously posted online. She forwarded and read it to the panelists. The question was the following one : “European Accessibility Act (a landmark EU law which requires some everyday products and services to be accessible for people with disabilities) : what impact does it have on translations to be delivered and how are the machine translation tools going to adapt to this?“ To my surprise, as well as to Amanda Leigh’s, no answer by the panelists, who stared at each other for a few seconds without saying a single word, was given. Mrs. Leigh, telling me from a distance via the internet that she was sorry that my question was not answered, commented on the fact that this question might have been a bit too complicated.

#2022TEF ended with short closing remarks by Christos Ellinides (director general of the Directorate-General for Translation at the European Commission) and very positive feedback from the organizers. Next year, #2023TEF will be held from Nov. 8th to 10th and it will be the 10th edition of this high-quality forum for translators and linguists. I cannot wait to join this fantastic event again next year!