The aim of this talk was to present a custom machine translation (MT) tool that we developed specifically for the literary domain as part of my PhD project, and more specifically the findings of the evaluation process that I carried out with my colleague, Emmanuelle Esperança-Rodier. Our objective, however, was not just to build a system that is adapted to literary texts, but that is also tailored to the style of an individual translator. And we are quite happy with the results that we presented.
The timing was ideal, as there is currently a growing branch hong kong mobile database of research at the crossroads between literary translation and new technologies, as manifested during an event that we recently held at the University of Liège, the CALT Conference before that, or the workshop that was organized prior to the NeTTT conference. So, the NeTTT Conference was also a good opportunity for us to engage with the scholarly community and suggest a new approach to machine translation, more closely centered on the human aspects of the human-machine interaction.
Besides the need for a catchy and hopefully not too tacky title, the reason behind this “human-adapted” appellation is tied to the views and motivation underlying our work; that is, a development and fine-tuning task that goes beyond just domain adaptation and tries to place the human at the very center of the process.