Once again, in June, GentVertaalt organised another Language Conference. The conference took place at the Novotel Gent Centrum on Saturday 22 June 2019.

GentVertaalt is an on-line and off-line initiative that brings language professionals together from the Ghent area and (much) further. For example, there is a Facebook group in which translators assist each other with advice and
support; while networking, learning and collaboration occasions are also  organised regularly.

Once again, the programme for this year’s Language Conference was very varied. Various speakers – all of them professionals from the language industry – attended to share their stories of entrepreneurship, marketing, (copyright) rights, the Dutch language and Neural Machine Translation (NMT).

The session about NMT was led by our own Nathalie De Sutter. She explained more about the next step towards the usability of NMT in translation production. According to the European Commission, 2018 was the first year in which more than half of the translation agencies and freelance translators stated they were using machine translations in one way or another. Yet there are still a number of obstacles since only 20% of respondents said they used it on a daily basis. The presentation created a clear and neutral picture of the evolution that technology has undergone over the past 70 years, as well as the impact of the latest developments in neural modelling and deep learning.

A number of use cases were also discussed: what are the most productive MT engines, and how are they used effectively? Which price models do the most important suppliers use, and how do they deal with privacy and data protection? Participants received specific advice for selecting projects and content types that are suitable for Machine Translation Post-Editing, and were given insight into the tools that measure productivity to prepare a realistic cost model and calculate  the Return on Investment.