Feel free to download the final CFP here and distribute it to your contacts.

Final Call for Papers

The International Conference on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (HiT-IT 2023) will take place in Naples, Italy between 7 and 9 July 2023. The conference will be preceded by tutorials on 6 July 2023. 

HiT-IT seeks to act as a meeting point for (and invites) researchers working in translation and interpreting technologies, practicing technology-minded translators and interpreters, companies and freelancers providing services in translation and interpreting as well as companies developing tools for translators and interpreters. In addition to the accepted papers for presentation, HiT-IT will feature invited talks by prominent experts as well as presentations and panels hosted by practitioners.

Most of the existing conferences are either focused too much on the automatic side of translation or concentrate largely on translators’ and interpreters’ professions. HiT-IT seeks to fill in this gap by allowing the discussion, the scientific comparison, and the mutual enrichment of professionals from both fields. HiT-IT 2023 addresses the development of translation tools and the experience translators and interpreters have with these tools as well as the development of machine translation engines, incorporating human (translators and interpreters’) expertise. The conference also offers a discussion forum and publishing opportunity for professionals from the human translation and interpreting fields (e.g. translators including subtitlers, interpreters, respeakers, researchers in translation and interpreting studies) and for researchers and developers working on translation and interpreting technology and machine translation. The idea behind this conference attendees to hear the other side’s position and to voice their opinions on how to make translation technologies closer to what would be accepted by large audiences, by incorporating human expertise into them. 

Conference topics

While we invite papers on the following four main themes, submissions on any topic related to translation and interpreting technology and natural language processing for translation and interpreting technology will be considered. Both theoretical ideas and practical applications are welcome. Position papers promoting new ideas, challenging the current status of the fields and proposing how to take them forward are also encouraged. 

User needs: 

• Analysis of translators’ and interpreters’ needs in terms of translation and interpreting technology 
• User requirements for interpreting and translation tools 
• Incorporating human knowledge into translation and interpreting technology 
• What existing translators’ (including subtitlers’) and interpreters’ tools do not offer 
• User requirements for electronic resources for translators and interpreters 
• Translation and interpreting workflows in larger organisations and the tools for translation and interpreting employed 

Existing methods and resources:

• Latest developments in translation and interpreting technology 
• Latest advances in (Neural) Machine Translation
• Latest advances in Translation Memory systems
• Latest  advances in post-editing and automatic post-editing
• Electronic resources for translators and interpreters 
• Annotation of corpora for translation and interpreting technology 
• Crowdsourcing techniques for creating resources for translation and interpreting 
• Latest advances in pre-editing and post-editing of machine translation 
• Human-informed (semi-)automatic generation of interlingual subtitles 
• Latest advances in technology for subtitling 
• Machine Translation for literary texts

Evaluation: 

• (Human) evaluation of translation and interpreting technology 
• Crowdsourcing techniques for evaluating translation and interpreting 
• Evaluation of discourse and other linguistic phenomena in (machine) translation and interpreting 
• Evaluation of existing resources for translators and interpreters 
• Human evaluation of neural machine translation 
• Automatic evaluation of neural machine translation 

More: 

• Position papers discussing how machine translation should be improved to incorporate translators’/interpreters’ expertise 
• Translation and interpreting technologies’ impact on the market 
• Comparison between human and machine translation 
• Changes in the translators and interpreters’ professions in the new technology era especially as a result of the latest developments in Neural Machine Translation 

Besides the above topics, submissions from industry and practitioners could discuss: distinctive work experience, ongoing practical work, in-house procedures or software, in-house processing pipelines, technology needs, managing a translation (technology) company, interpreters in the technology era, IP issues or any topic related to their professional activities in the field of (technology for) translation and interpreting, etc. 

Submissions and publication

The conference invites the following types of submissions reporting original unpublished work.

User papers  for industry and practitioners. References to related work are optional. Allowed paper length: between 2 and 4 pages (without references). 
Academic submissions, in three different categories (have to follow formatting requirements, references to related work are required): 

• (Academic) full-papers: ‘original completed research’, should not exceed 12 pages excluding references.
• (Academic) ‘work-in-progress papers’, should not exceed 7 pages excluding references.
• (Academic) ‘demo papers’, should not exceed 5 pages excluding references. In addition to the papers, the authors will be expected to demonstrate the systems at the conference.

The conference will not consider the submission and evaluation of abstracts only.

Each submission will be reviewed by 3 members of the Programme Committee. Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. For further instructions please follow the submission guidelines at the conference website.

The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and made available online on the conference website. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers.

We plan to invite the authors of the best papers to submit extended versions to a special issue of a prestigious journal. 

IMPORTANT DATES 

Submission deadline: 30 April 2023 (extended deadline)
Notification of acceptance: 31 May 2023 
Final version due: 10 June 2023 
Early fee deadline: 20 June 2023 
Conference dates: 7, 8 and 9 July 2023
Tutorials: 6 July 2023