Organising Committee for TC44

Maria Recort Ruiz
Coordinator for TC44
 
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.  For TC43 in 2021 she joined Olaf-Michael Stefanov as Co-coordinator. For TC44 she is the Coordinator, assisted by João Esteves-Ferreira.

João Esteves Ferreira
Assistant Coordinator for TC44

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. He returns for TC44 to assist María Recort Ruiz in the coordination of TC44, 2022.

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.

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.

 

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, centring, 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.

Joss Moorkens

Joss Moorkens is an Associate Professor and Chair of postgraduate translation programmes at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, a Funded Investigator and Challenge Leader at the ADAPT Centre, and a member of DCU’s Institute of Ethics and Centre for Translation and Textual Studies.

He has authored or coauthored over 50 journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers on translation technology, machine translation post-editing, user evaluation of machine translation, translator precarity, and translation ethics. He served on the organising committee for ASLING TC41 and TC42 and returns for this year’s iteration.

He is General Coeditor of the journal Translation Spaces with Prof. Dorothy Kenny, and coedited the book ‘Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice’, published in 2018 by Springer, and special issues of Machine Translation (2019) and Translation Spaces (2020). He leads the Technology working group (with Prof. Tomáš Svoboda) as a board member of the European Masters in Translation network and sits on the advisory board of the Journal of Specialised Translation.

 
 

Vilelmini Sosoni


Vilelmini Sosoni is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University in Greece. She has taught Specialised Translation in the United Kingdom at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Roehampton University, and in Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Metropolitan College and the Institut Français d’Athènes.

She also has extensive professional experience having worked as a professional translator, editor and subtitler.

She studied English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds 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 the Translation of Institutional and Political Texts, Corpus Linguistics, Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility, as well as Machine Translation and Cognitive Science.

She is, among others, a founding member of the Laboratory “Language and Politics” of the Ionian University and the Greek Chapter of Women in Localization and a member of the “Research Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies” of the University of Roehampton.

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) funded by Erasmus+.

She has participated in several EU-funded projects, notably Resonant, Trumpet, 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.

 
 

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 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 joined María Recort Ruiz as Co-coordinator for AsLing’s second virtual conference, TC43, which took place online in the week of 15 November 2021. For TC44, Olaf-Michael continues to serve on the conference Organising Committee, as he has done every year since AsLing took over the series.

Based in Vienna, Olaf-Michael is actively engaged worldwide in a variety of multilingual projects and conferences.

The Executive Committee of AsLing may be announcing additional members of the Coordinating Committee for TC44.