CFP: Translation in Transition

Deadline: February 14, 2022

The conference is a continuation of the well-established Translation in Transition series that serves as a meeting point for scholars conducting research in translation based on an empirical methodological paradigm. With the previous conferences in mind, held in Copenhagen, Germersheim, Ghent, Barcelona and Kent (Ohio), the Prague edition wants to put special emphasis on three main directions: we would like to draw on the vast resources of the Czech National Corpus (including InterCorp, a large multilingual parallel corpus), and concentrate on the methodological interplay between translation studies and contrastive linguistics. At the same time, prominence will be given to machine translation, as Prague is one of its international centres.

Conference topics

We welcome contributions grounded in empirical approaches to studying translation, as well as theoretical and position papers on the following topics:

  • Corpus-based and corpus-driven methodology in multilingual corpora
  • Models and methods in translation studies and contrastive linguistics
  • Register/genre variation in multilingual corpora
  • Specific features of translation seen through parallel/comparable corpora
  • Translation in specific settings: between close languages, from a third language, non-native translation, translation corpora in EU institutions, etc.
  • Spoken language in translation and corpora
  • The use of corpora in translator/interpreter training
  • The use of corpora in translation quality assessment
  • Machine translation: analysis of neural MT models, selection and preparation of data for MT, ‘translationese’ in MT
  • Manual and automatic methods for evaluating translation quality and MT suitability for post-editing
  • The communicative aspect of studying translation: the communication chain from sender to final recipient
  • Computer-assisted translation/interpreting (CAT/CAI – new developments, CAT vis-à-vis MT, CAT UI, UX)
  • MT post-editing (MTPE types, practices, approaches, ethics)

The official language of the conference is English.

Programme

The main conference will consist of both plenary lectures and full papers. Full papers will include a 20 minutes’ presentation and 10 minutes’ discussion.

Keynote speakers

Gert de Sutter (Ghent University)

Silvia Bernardini (University of Bologna)Venue

It is envisaged to hold the conference at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. The venue is in the city centre, within easy reach by public transport. However, given the still uncertain situation, we are ready to move the conference to hybrid or online form.

Submissions

We invite original submissions that deal with any of the conference topics. To encourage a fruitful exchange of ideas and experience among the researchers of various fields of specialization, preference will be given to interdisciplinary contributions that cover two or more of the conference topics.

The submissions are to be made in the form of anonymized extended abstracts that should be between 500 and 800 words long (excluding references). Apart from a clear outline of the aims and methods of the study, the abstracts should also provide (preliminary) results. The abstracts will be submitted through Easy Chair and reviewed by at least two members of the scientific committee.

Important dates
Submission of abstracts by 14 Feb 2022

Notification of acceptance by 30 Apr 2022

Registration from 1 May 2022

PublicationsAs the primary goal of the conference is to serve as a platform for a fruitful exchange of ideas, we do not plan to publish full conference proceedings. However, abstracts of all accepted papers will be made available on-line, and in addition, we offer two publication options:

Further information to this effect will be communicated in due course.
Organizers

The conference is organized by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, in cooperation with the Institute of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University.