The International Conference on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (HiT-IT 2023),
Naples, Italy, 7 – 9 July 2023
First call for papers

Submission deadline: 10th April 2023
Website: http://hit-it-conference.org/home/

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

We are pleased to announce the International Conference on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (HiT-IT 2023). HiT-IT 2023 is a follow-up of the successful HiT-IT workshops, which took place in Varna, Bulgaria in parallel to the international conferences RANLP 2017 and RANLP 2019. The conference 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.

TOPICS

We invite papers on the following four main themes, however submissions on related themes/topics will also 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
• 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
• technology for subtitling

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

Other:
• 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

User papers for industry and practitioners. References to related work are optional. Allowed paper length: between 1 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 – describing original completed research. Allowed paper length: maximum 8 pages (without references).
• (academic) work-in-progress papers – describing work in progress, late breaking research, papers at a more conceptual stage, and other types of papers that do not fit in the ‘full’ papers category. Allowed paper length: maximum 6 pages (without references).
• (academic) demo papers – describing working systems. Allowed paper length: maximum 4 pages (without references). In addition to the papers, the authors will be expected to demonstrate the systems at the conference.

The papers will be submitted via the START system. The submission link will be published in the second call for papers and added to the website.

The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and made available online on the conference website.

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: 10th April 2023
Notification of acceptance: 31st May 2023
Final version due: 10th June 2023
Early fee deadline: 20th June 2023
Conference dates: 7th – 9th July 2023

ORGANISATION

HiT-IT is organised by the University of Wolverhampton, the University of Surrey (United Kingdom), the University of Malaga (Spain), and the University of Naples L’Orientale, (Italy), and the Association of Computational Linguistics (Bulgaria).

Conference Chairs
• Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga)
• Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
• Johanna Monti (University of Naples L’Orientale)
• Constantin Orasan (University of Surrey)

Organising Committee
• Dayana Abuin Rios (University of Malaga)
• Khadija Ait Elqih (University of Naples l’Orientale)
• Anastasia Bezobrazova (University of Malaga)
• Meriem Boulekhoukh (University of Oran)
• Rocío Caro Quintana (University of Wolverhampton)
• Amal El Farhmat (University of Malaga)
• Lilit Kharatian (University of Malaga)
• Nikolai Nikolov (INCOMA Ltd.)
• Daria Sokova (New Bulgarian University)

The Programme Committee members and the invited speakers will be announced in the second and further calls.

Venue

The conference will take place at the Palazzo del Mediterraneo, University of Naples