Technology and Interpreting: Bridging the gap between Research and Practice

Computer assisted interpreting has been at the core of academic endeavour in Heidelberg ever since one of the first booth friendly terminology tools was developed here in the early days of the discipline. Many of our research findings are now commonplace: Today, using a computer to prepare and look up terminology has become a matter of course for many colleagues in the modern booth and there is a host of suitable applications. To critically evaluate which tools can map and automate sections of our digital workflow, the Heidelberg Conference "ShowCase Dolmetschwissenschaft Live - ein ganzer Tag Fachkongress" format was designed in 2015 as a test bed for CAI: Documentation of a multitude of structured workflows in all eight floor languages is central to this technical conference with all the trappings of a modern, professional setting. Seasoned interpreters work together with young professionals and students to cover the real-life conference part, but also computer based preparation techniques. The recordings of all Heidelberg Conferences (Engineering, Medical, Law, Finance, synthetic Biology etc.) have been transcribed by our research team assisted by the latest speech recognition tools, aligned and labour-intensively annotated by student researchers to establish reliable, evidence-based correlations between the use of certain tools and preparation methods with features observed in both process and product. Now that the ShowCase conference is entering its fifth year, the Heidelberg Conference Interpreting Corpus aggregates quite a decent cohort or interpreters, a typology of controlled settings and variables for empirical testing and the statistical significance of our findings afforded by an aggregation of several thousands of recordings. A set of postgraduate and Ph.D. research projects develop the different focus areas within the general CI-Workflow- and CAI research fields. For more information please refer to our project outline at www.HeiCiC.de.

At the University of Mainz we have released the first public demo version (0.1) of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) component of a computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tool. An older off-line version was first described in Fantinuoli C. "Speech Recognition in the Interpreter Workstation". Proceedings of the Translating and the Computer 39 (2017), 25-34. This version has an online engine and is server-based. The public demo version is available for English only (and some of its varieties) and has a preloaded mini English to French glossary to test (FAO). It is able to look up the terms in the glossary, numbers and named entities (limited to countries). We will soon release a second version supporting user's glossaries (through InterpretBank) and other 10+ languages. How to use it: as the glossary has been preloaded, the easiest thing to do is to use a microphone and "become" the speaker. In a real setting, the sound channel coming out of the interpreter console should be used as line-in for the interpreter's computer. Technical notes are available on the demo webpage. Note: The version is not adapted to be used in production, but it has been publicly released to allow the community to start an informed discussion on the subject. The demo (it requires Chrome) is available here: http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/fantinuo/#tools Best, Claudio Fantinuoli

By Claudio Fantinuoli Synopsis Unlike other professions, the impact of information and communication technology on interpreting has been moderate so far. However, recent advances in the areas of remote, computer-assisted, and, most recently, machine interpreting, are gaining the interest of both researchers and practitioners. This volume aims at exploring key issues, approaches and challenges to the interplay of interpreting and technology, an area that is still underrepresented in the field of Interpreting Studies. The contributions to this volume cover topics in the area of computer-assisted and remote interpreting, both in the conference as well as in the court setting, and report on experimental studies. Link: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/209