The JIAMCATT 2022 meeting took place this year in Geneva from 20 to 22 April. After two years of the pandemic, it was the first event in hybrid format, with about 80 participants present in Geneva and approximately 170 connected from other places. The Translation Centre took part, giving two presentations (‘An effort-based analysis of the quality of post-editing’ by Daniel Marín Buj and Mauro Bubnic and ‘The Translation Centre’s optimised workflow management solution’ by Giuseppe Forte and Mauro Bubnic) and one live demonstration of the eCdT platform by Giuseppe Forte.

Post-editing of MT had a central role this year. Both the hosting organisation (World Intellectual Property Organisation – WIPO) and the Centre had worked totally independently on the quality evaluation of machine translation. The WIPO presented their ‘Analysis, exploration and visualization of post-editing data’. While there are some similarities with what the Centre does, there are also notable differences: their analysis includes TM content, while the Centre only analyses MT output. Furthermore, on the basis of their quality evaluation, the WIPO decides if texts are good enough for post-editing or whether they need to be translated. In our case, we automatically select post-editing whenever documents in the right language combinations arrive from two clients: EMA and the EUIPO. The Centre’s presentation thus focused on the results in the different languages and on future plans to further increase the quality of machine translation results. The meeting was also a good opportunity to make participants aware of the importance of good source documents and of the existence of technical and non-technical tips to improve originals. We therefore made our ‘Writing for machine translation’ brochure available to the audience.

The other presentation by the Centre focused on the eCdT workflow and in particular on its modularised nature and on the most important automation characteristics, e.g. embedded turnaround times, internal or external orientation based on criteria such as language combination, volume, workload of translators etc., specific percentages of time for each phase of the in-house life-cycle of a linguistic service, and business rules. The presentation attracted considerable interest from the participants and our workflow tool was also an important topic in a specific break out session. In this case, we were able to provide advice to the many organisations that are struggling to obtain a tool which integrates not only the translation phases but also the various interdependencies (e.g. order forms, invoices, budget consumption, etc.).

On the whole, the hybrid format worked perfectly well and the overall organisation of the event was extremely well managed by the WIPO. Next year’s JIAMCATT event will be organised by the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organisation (ITCILO) in … Turin! We are certainly looking forward to that.