During his 10-months compulsary military service, Jean-Marie was assigned legal translations with the Belgian Court Martial in Germany.
From 1982 to 1989, he translated, wrote, corrected, rewrote the small print of insurance policies nobody ever reads.
After this first experience, he ran his own translation business from 1989 to 2005 specializing in economics and law. He also freelanced for law firms, the Belgian government and international institutions like the EU and the UN International Court of Justice.
During all these years, Jean-Marie was very active in professional associations (board member of the Belgian Chamber of Translators, vice-president of FIT, the International Federation of Translators, chair of FIT Terminology Committee, and founder of the Brussels Translation Group and the University of Mons Alumni Association). He mainly focused on terminology and translation tools, translators’ ethics and intellectual property rights. He organised many workshops on these topics and was invited to speak at numerous conferences and seminars in France, Switzerland, South Africa, Argentina, UK, Germany, Canada, US, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, among others. He's currently chief translator-revisor with the Belgian Court of Audit.
He was a certified translator for all Belgian courts from 1986 until his recent resignation.
Jean-Marie holds a M.A. degree in translation and a post-grad in terminology. He also graduated in political sciences, marketing and international trade. He's currently completing a master in international law, just for the fun.
João Esteves-Ferreira graduated in Arts, Business Administration and Terminology. He qualified as a Sworn Translator in Switzerland (1977) and as a Conference Interpreter (1983). He has held several posts in Swiss professional translation organisations, culminating with the Presidencies of ASTTI (Swiss Association of Translators, terminologists and Interpreters) and ASTJ (Swiss Association of Sworn-in Translators).
João served as Council Member of the Fédération internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) from 1996 to 2005 and as Chairman of FIT Europe 2005-2008. He was the Founder and first Chairman of FIT Translation Tools and Technology Committee (2000-2005).
In 2000, he founded tradulex, the International Association for Quality Translation, which he has chaired since its inception.
He is also President of AsLing, the International Association for Advancement in Language Technology and Co-Chaired the Translating and the Computer Conferences TC36, TC37 and TC38. He served as Coordinator for TC39, and is again Co-Chair for TC40.
His current activities, besides translating and interpreting, are the coordination of tradulex and the training of professional colleagues.
João has published a great number of papers on legal translation, translation technology and professional issues.After investigating the QC functions of CAT tools vs. the stand-alone QA tools Error Spy, QA Distiller and ApSIC XBench, she oversaw the introduction of Quality Assurance procedures within the company. Following a merger in 2011, she was engaged as consultant and trainer by Arancho Doc, where she worked until 2015.
She has lectured at Bologna and Palermo universities, given presentations at numerous conferences throughout Europe and held workshops on translation tools and QA procedures and technology. An expert in translation technology and the problems related to new authoring methods, she provides consultancy services and training for translators and international companies.
A conference chair of the historic Translating and the Computer conference, in London. In 2014 she was one of the founding members of AsLing, a not for profit association set up in Geneva to promote the development, knowledge and use of translation technology, which took over the conference. and has served as one of its Vice Presidents ever since. She served as Lead Chair in 2013 for TC35 and as Coordinator for TC38 in 2016.
His research output was highlighted as being internationally leading in the last UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008). Whereas Prof Mitkov is best known for his seminal contributions to the areas of anaphora resolution and automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, his extensively cited research (more than 210 publications including 9 books, 25 journal articles and 25 book chapters) also covers topics such as machine translation, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, translation memory, evaluation, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals and text simplification.
Prof Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press) which has been hailed as the most successful Oxford Handbook. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press), Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers, and Consulting Editor of Oxford University Press publications in Computational Linguistics. He is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the forthcoming second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.
Olaf-Michael Stefanov is an IT professional with a strong focus on multilingualism. During 36 years on staff at the United Nations he managed various information-technology related areas, the last being Library and Linguistic Support for Vienna headquarters, which included reference and terminology support for the editorial, translation and interpretation sections.
Having introduced the first completely web-based multilingual terminology database handling Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Latin scripts for input, query, and output, VINTARS, he presented it at Translating and the Computer – 20, in 1998. He also introduced digital dictation and voice-recognition into the translation workflow of several international and multinational organizations.
Although retired from the UN he continues to serve in the site administration and management of JIAMCATT, an information exchange among governmental and intergovernmental language professionals, serves as co-moderator of the JIAMCATT Working Group on Standards and Interoperability and has implemented multilingual Web 2.0 and CMS tools for JIAMCATT.
He is also active in Tiki, a leading open source CMS, Wiki and Groupware tool and was active in drafting the ITS 2.0 (Internationalization Tag Set) standard under the aegis of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2013.
He has been a member of the Programme Committee of FEISGILTT since 2012.
He is co-founder, Vice President and coordinateur of AsLing, the International Association for Language Technology which took over the Translating and the Computer conference series from ASLIB in 2014.
Having served as co-chair of conferences in this series from 2000 he served as lead chair in 2013. For TC37, 2015, the second conference in this series run by AsLing, he was conference coordinator, a role he has been assigned once again for TC40, 2018.
Based in Vienna, Olaf-Michael is actively engaged worldwide in a variety of multilingual projects and conferences.
Sandra Chambers grew up in an international environment near Geneva. She is bilingual in English and French, and fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. Following her university studies in the UK and Spain, where she obtained a Bachelors in Psychology and a Masters in Intercultural Communication with International Business, she has held a variety of positions involving language and translation related activities. With a view to consolidating her translation skills, she recently completed a Masters in Translation Studies, which she obtained with honours. Her work positions have included Training Coordinator for the southwest EMEA area in an IT company, Special Needs Assistant in an international school, E-Learning Project Manager in a language training company, and Translation Coordinator at the University of Perpignan as part of the team setting up a multilingual Masters programme. She is also established as a freelance translator.
In October 2018, she joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris where she works as Project Coordinator on the Global Tax Forum Coordination Team.
In addition to her commitment to languages, Sandra enjoys travelling and a variety of sporting activities, particularly capoeira, swimming, yoga, Pilates and dancing. Having followed a yoga teacher-training course, she obtained her instructor’s diploma in February 2018.
Sandra joined the AsLing Organising Committee for the Translating and the Computer Conference TC40 (2018) in late 2017.
Joss Moorkens is an Assistant Professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University and a researcher affiliated with the ADAPT Centre and the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies.
He has authored articles and chapters on translation technology, MT post-editing, translation evaluation, translator precarity, translation copyright, and translation technology standards.
He co-edited the book ‘Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice’ (2018) and a 2019 special issue of Machine Translation journal on Human Factors in Neural Machine Translation, both published by Springer.
Maria Recort Ruiz is a philologist, translator and terminologist who works as Document Services Coordinator and Terminology Manager at the International Labour Organization in Geneva. She is responsible for the production and management of official documents, management of terminology work and the use of new CATT tools to improve working methods.
She holds a Degree in Slavic Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she specialized in Russian and Polish Language and Literature, and Linguistics; a Master in French and Comparative Literature (19th-20th centuries) from the University of Montpellier, where she conducted research on the roman populaire at the beginning of the 20th century; and a Master in Specialized Translation from the University of Geneva.
Before joining the ILO, Maria worked as a freelance translator and editor for international organizations and the private sector.