The October meeting of MA students of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation with Damjan Popic and Vojko Gorjanc

On 5 October, the first and second year master students met with Damjan Popic, an Associate Professor of the Department of Translation in the University of Ljubljana.
During the meeting, Mr. Popic made a presentation on the topic “Of Machines and Men: Translation in the Digital Age”. Vojko Gorjanc, the Professor of the Department of Translation in the University of Ljubljana, also participated in the lecture. During the presentation, Damjan Popic outlined the history of machine translation services, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as the assistance these services could provide to the interpreters. Moreover, he shared his own experience of working with machine translation programs and drew students’ attention to the need of any machine translation post-editing.
Mr. Popic also noted that students should not be afraid of machines, which according to some studies could replace humans in this field, because no technology is able to recognize sarcasm and irony, to convey puns or idioms correctly, not to mention the ability to recognize allusions and references. Vojko Gorjanc, who has abundant experience of cooperation with the developers of machine translation programmes, also expressed his opinion on this issue.
The students asked numerous questions about the subject, the future of this field and the use of such programmes during their working career. Students are grateful for the opportunity to enhance their knowledge as well as to adopt the best practices that will certainly be useful in the near future.