Translation plays a critical yet often invisible role in conflict and war zones, shaping narratives, influencing power dynamics, and mediating between opposing sides while navigating competing ideologies and serving political interests. This talk examines how translation is neither neutral nor innocent but deeply political, embedded within institutional structures of power and ideology. Focusing on political proposals and plans drafted within the framework of the “two-state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and their translations in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, I analyze how multiple agents—including governments, political leaders, diplomats, and media institutions—strategically use translation to produce, disseminate, and legitimize narratives that serve their interests, promote specific ideologies, and respond to their constituencies’ needs. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that draws on Product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, I demonstrate the complexity of analyzing political discourse in translation in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and highlight the ethical, political, and ideological stakes involved in linguistic choices—both in original documents and their translations.
This talk presents my core research contributions to the under-researched field of productivity and workflow optimization in the translation industry, focusing on the post-editing of machine translation. I begin with a brief overview of the current landscape, highlighting key research gaps and the motivation behind my work. I then focus on my analyses of translation projects from Toppan Digital Language, a leading language service provider. I discuss findings from the first large-scale quantitative analysis of speed in human translation and post-editing, based on real-world data for 90 million words translated by 879 linguists across 11 language pairs.
I then introduce RECAP (Repetition, Error, Change, Action, Post-editing), the most detailed typology available to date for classifying the types of edits that linguists make to correct the machine translation output. Using this categorization, I conducted a mixed-methods analysis of edit types in a small corpus of English-to-Italian post-editing tasks requiring different levels of effort from the translators. Among a wide range of findings, this analysis revealed that linguists frequently had to make the same corrections repeatedly. As a possible solution for this problem, I propose AREA (Automating Repetitive Editing Actions), an algorithm that could automate up to 46% of repetitive corrections in English-to-Italian post-editing.
against which machine interpreting technologies are evaluated. However, access to corpora
remains a critical bottleneck in interpreting studies due to data collection and processing
challenges and the absence of interpreting-specific corpus publication venues. In this talk, I
will present two technical infrastructures facilitating corpus access: a metadata schema
standardising corpus description and the Unified Interpreting Corpus (UNIC;
https://unic.dipintra.it/) platform for data and metadata search and publication. Guided by the internationally established FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability)
and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics) principles for
scientific data management and stewardship, we designed the infrastructures based on a
review of 125 spoken and signed language interpreting corpora, relevant international
standards, community knowledge, and using open-source technologies. Feedback from
interpreting students, researchers, and interpreters demonstrates greater perceived usefulness and satisfaction with UNIC than general-purpose search portals. Overall, I will illustrate a value- and consensus-driven path towards optimising the use of interpreting corpora and careful curation of new ones, which avoids the duplication of efforts, helps chart research directions, and fosters co-design with communities.
Translation Highlights:
- Horace's Epodes and Odes
- Ovid's Metamorphoses
- currently working on Catullus
All TRIP students are welcome but must RSVP (link forthcoming). You can also submit a question.