MoTra21: Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age

MoTra 2021


Computational Linguistics



Topic and Goals of the Workshop
Translatology is the theoretical and practical study of translation. It combines insights from linguistics, the humanities, cognitive and computer science to understand the process of translating between languages and the particular features characterizing language in translation. Central concepts of contemporary translatology are translationese, linguistic patterns that tend to make translations more similar to each other than to texts originally written in their target language; and variation, which refers to the fact that different types of translations, such as written translations vs. interpreting, display systematic linguistic differences.
The Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age seeks to facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange between researchers in linguistics, AI, CL, NLP, translation studies, cognitive and computer science focusing on modeling translation from diverse angles, such as variation in translation, machine translation, translation quality assessment and translationese. Specifically, the workshop aims to foster innovative research at the intersection between machine and human translation modeling by applying concepts from translation studies to machine translation or using machine translation techniques to explore research questions in translatology. We encourage research on modeling aspects of translation, including word embeddings, neural or statistical machine translation, feature-based text classification, syntactic and semantic parsing, monolingual or multilingual language models, text generation, and stylometry.
We invite papers on all relevant research areas, including but not limited to:
Translationese detection and analysis through quantitative means
Improving understanding of translation in the context of NLP
Analysis and interpretation of variation in translation
Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of translation models
Contextualized and multimodal translation analysis
Computational semantics and pragmatics applied to translation studies
Sentiment and emotion analysis of translations
Human translation quality assessment and evaluation
Cognitive and computational insights of variation in translation and translationese
Computational models of translation types such as communicative translation, semantic translation, transcreation.
Presentation of new corpora for translation studies, such as literary translation corpora, interpreting transcript datasets.
Translation and Post-editing interfaces
Cognitive modeling of translation processes, including cognitive load measurements
We welcome all kinds of contributions addressing the topics mentioned above.
Program Committee
Silvia Bernardini (University of Bologna)
Yuri Bizzoni (Saarland University)
Michael Carl (Kent State University)
Cristina España y Bonet (DFKI/GmbH)
Josef van Genabith (Saarland University/DFKI)
Alina Karakanta (University of Trento)
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (Saarland University)
Antoni Oliver (Open University of Catalunya)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds)
Antonio Toral (University of Gröningen)
Elke Teich (Saarland University)
Carl Vogel (Trinity College Dublin)
Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa)
Organizers’ Contacts
Yuri Bizzoni: yuri.bizzoni@uni-saarland.de
Elke Teich: e.teich@mx.uni-saarland.de
Cristina España y Bonet: cristina.espanaibonet@uni-saarland.de
Josef van Genabith: Josef.Van_Genabith@dfki.de
Important Dates
Monday, March 22, 2021: Workshop paper submission deadline
Tuesday, April 20, 2021: Notification day
Monday, May 3, 2021: Camera-ready workshop papers due
Monday, May 31, 2021: Pre-conference workshops
Paper Submission
We invite submissions of three kinds:
long papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research, up to 8 pages without references;
short papers on smaller, focused contributions, negative results, surveys, or opinion pieces, up to 4 pages without references; and
demonstration papers on software or resource demonstrations of systems, interfaces, infrastructures, data collections, or annotations, up to 4 pages without references.
Papers accepted for presentation at the conference will appear in the NoDaLiDa 2021 proceedings, published as part of the NEALT Proceedings Series by Linköping University Electronic Press and in the ACL Anthology.
All submissions should follow the official Nodalida 2021 format templates: http://nodalida2021.org/authorkit.zip. The submissions are to be anonymous and follow the ACL Author Guidelines. Parallel submission to another forum is possible, providing that the authors inform the organizers without delay, should the author choose to present the work at the other venue and withdraw it from this workshop. Papers submitted to other venues must indicate this at submission time in the Easychair submission system. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to attend the workshop.
The submission site is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=motra21.
To inquire about the submission and reviewing process or generally the workshop’s scientific program, please email yuri.bizzoni@uni-saarland.de.
The conference will be held online, co-located with the Nodalida Conference.