TC42 Organising Committee

João Esteves-Ferreira
AsLing President, TC42 Coordinator

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 since TC36 (2014). He served as Coordinator for TC39, and is again Coordinator for TC42.

His current activities, besides translating and interpreting, are the coordination of tradulex and the training of professional colleagues. He is also active in the development of translation standards and serves since 2007 as an expert for the assessment of research projects and academic curricula in Europe (UK, Belgium, Spain, etc.)

João has published a great number of papers on legal translation, translation technology and professional issues.

Maria Recort Ruiz
Deputy TC42 Coordinator

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.

Sandra Chambers

Juliet Macan
AsLing Vice-President

After fifteen years as a freelance translator in Italy, specialising in medicine, pharmacology and plant pathology, she joined Intracoop, an Italian cooperative of translators and interpreters. Here, she encountered her first CAT tools: IBM Translation Manager, Trados and DejaVu. In 1999 she became Translation Tools Manager of Ic.doc, responsible for ensuring optimum use of translation technology, training in-house staff and external freelancers, advising customers, evaluating new projects, problem-solving and testing new tools including SLDx, Multitrans, across, memoQ, SDL Studio, XTM and ONTRAM.

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.

Ruslan Mitkov
AsLing Vice-President

Ruslan Mitkov (Prof Dr) has been working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and related areas since the early 1980s.

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.

Prof Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences.

He has acted as Programme Chair of various international conferences on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation, Translation Technology, Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Anaphora Resolution.

He is asked on a regular basis to review for leading international funding bodies and organisations and to act as a referee for applications for Professorships both in North America and Europe. Ruslan Mitkov is regularly asked to review for leading journals, publishers and conferences and serve as a member of Programme Committees or Editorial Boards.

Prof Mitkov has been an external examiner of many doctoral theses and curricula in the UK and abroad, including Master’s programmes related to NLP, Translation and Translation Technology.

Dr Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit (more than £ 15,000,000) and is currently acting as Principal Investigator of several large projects, some of which are funded by UK research councils, by the EC as well as by companies and users from the UK and USA.

Ruslan Mitkov received his MSc from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.

Dr Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995 and where he set up the Research Group in Computational Linguistics. His Research Group has emerged as an internationally leading unit in applied Natural Language Processing (the output of the Research Group was classed by RAE 2008 as internationally leading, internationally excellent and internationally recognised) and members of the group have won awards in different NLP/shared-task competitions. In addition to being Head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics, Prof Mitkov is also Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing. The Research Institute consists of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics and the Research Group in Statistical Cybermetrics, which is another top performer in the recent RAE.

Ruslan Mitkov is Vice President of AsLing an international Association for promoting Language Technology.

In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof Mitkov was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in November 2011. In November 2014 Dr Mitkov was conferred the title Profesor Honoris Causa at Veliko Tarnovo University.

Olaf-Michael Stefanov
AsLing Vice-President

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.