Translating Ulyssei@s: Work in progress between general and specialised translation in light of NMT

Abstract

It is common knowledge that the publication of translation projects carried out by students is a very motivating factor for training. Since the second semester of 2015-2016, undergraduate translation students of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto have participated in the development of the French and English versions of the digital encyclopaedia Ulyssei@s, created by the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa (ILCML) in the early 2010s. Besides motivating students, this translation project published on the Internet allows us to develop translation skills, foster teamwork, consolidate the three-phase methodology proposed by Gouadec (2002, 2007), and experiment with several essential tasks in language services: collaborative glossary-making, translation, revision of human translation and post-editing neural machine translation (NMT). Some of the challenges posed by the translation of Ulyssei@s are common to all types of translation, while others are specific to the translation of entries of this sui generis encyclopaedia, such as a variety of textual genres (biography, literary criticism, prose, poetry, theatre, essay) in hybrid texts and the need to find the original or the official translation of the works cited. This paper focuses on the data collected in the spring semester of 2022 and is based on the results of a survey submitted to students at the end of the project. It aims to share the experience of developing an inevitably unfinished project and adapting training and learning to the latest advances in Human Language Technology, since NMT has become a valuable tool for human translators, and Ulyssei@s is a digital encyclopaedia regularly enriched by ILCML collaborators with new entries.

Keywords

• translator training
• digital encyclopaedia
• multi-generic text
• CAT tools
• neural machine translation (NMT)