Organising Committee for TC43
Maria Recort Ruiz
Co-Coordinator for TC43
AsLing Secretary
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.
After several years attending Translating and the Computer conferences and after giving several presentations in past years, María started her career within the Organising Committee as Deputy Coordinator for TC42 in 2020. This year she joins Olaf-Michael Stefanov as Co-coordinator.
Olaf-Michael Stefanov
Co-Coordinator for TC43
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 the 20th Translating and the Computer 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, served as co-moderator of the JIAMCATT Working Group on Standards and Interoperability and 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 had again for TC40, 2018, and once again for TC43, 2021.
He joins María Recort Ruiz as Co-coordinator for AsLing’s second virtual conference, TC43, taking place online in the week of 15 November 2021.
Based in Vienna, Olaf-Michael is actively engaged worldwide in a variety of multilingual projects and conferences.
João Esteves Ferreira
Sponsorship Coordinator for TC43
AsLing President
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 again for TC42, AsLing’s first-ever online virtual conference.
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.
Ruslan Mitkov
Publications Coordinator for TC43
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.
Sandra Chambers
Vilelmini Sosoni
Dr Vilelmini Sosoni is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, where she teaches Legal and Economic Translation, EU texts Translation and Terminology, Translation Technology, Translation Project Management and Audiovisual Translation (AVT). In the past, she taught Specialised Translation in the UK at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Roehampton University, and in Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Institut Français d’ Athènes.
She also has extensive industrial experience having worked as translator, editor, subtitler and interpreter as well as communications expert for the Hellenic Parliament. She holds a BA in English Language and Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MA in Translation and a PhD in Translation and Text Linguistics from the University of Surrey.
Her research interests lie in the areas of Translation of Institutional Texts, Machine Translation (MT), Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Studies, and AVT. She is a founding member of the Research Lab “Language and Politics” of the Ionian University and a member of its “Bioinformatics and Human Electrophysiology Lab”.
She is also a member of the Advisory Board and the Management Board of the European Master’s in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM TTI). As of November 2020, she is also the Events Manager of the Greek Chapter of Women in Localization.
She has participated in several EU-funded projects, notably RESONANT, TraMOOC, Eurolect Observatory and Training Action for Legal Practitioners: Linguistic Skills and Translation in EU Competition Law, while she has edited several volumes and books on translation and published numerous articles in international journals and collective volumes.
Denis Dechandon
Denis Dechandon is an experienced tool and business manager with a demonstrated history of working in in the government administration industry. His studies and professional activities focus on multilingualism, linguistics, translation, natural language processing and foreign languages, as well as semantic technologies, interoperability, knowledge organisation system creation and maintenance, and process automation. Enhancing the semantic interoperability, enlarging the use of semantic technologies and supporting government administrations and national public services for creating, maintaining, enhancing and disseminating semantic assets and tools are at the very heart of the activities he is currently involved in, the ultimate purpose being to increase data flows, the sharing reuse of data, as well as to promote further developments in the field of Linguistic Linked Open Data.
The Executive Committee of AsLing may be announcing additional members of the Coordinating Committee for TC43.
The sponsors listed below are those of the TC43 conference, not of AsLing.