A public lecture by Anthony Pym

Neural Machine Translation and the Translation Professions

A public lecture by Anthony Pym, Translation Studies (Intercultural Studies), The University of Melbourne.

How good is neural machine translation? How good will it become? When everyone can use high-quality free online machine translation, what will be left for translators to do? Eschewing the facile wisdom of gurus, Anthony Pym will approach these questions empirically, looking at research on the technologies and critically assessing their claims. It will be proposed that although this is certainly not the end of the road for professional translators, new maps are needed.

Originally from Perth, Anthony Pym has been a professional translator and translator trainer in Spain, the United States and Australia for more than 20 years. He currently teaches at the University of Melbourne and is Distinguished Professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona in Spain and Extra-ordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He was President of the European Society for Translation Studies from 2010 to 2016. He has authored, co-authored or edited 28 books and some 200 articles in the general field of translation and intercultural communication. He holds a PhD in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.