Current events

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Human augmentation for AI in Technical Communication

In the talk, I plan to discuss practical ways for technical and professional communicators to engage in ethical AI development using familiar approaches such as User experience design, Human-in-the-loop using AI augmentation and Communicating for AI transparency. 

Claudia Sistig, Compart GmbH - Germany
Claudia Sistig, a graduate of the Technical Writing program at Hochschule Hannover, has been working as a Technical Writer at Compart GmbH since 2011. 
In 2016, she advanced to managing an agile development team as a certified Scrum Master. Beginning in early 2022, she has been engaged in exploring the potential of AI-based content generation and management in the field of technical writing.

Dr. Jeremias Rössler - University of Erfurt - Germany

Moderation: Prof. Sissi Closs. Karlsruhe University - Germany
Sissi Closs, Professor of Information and Media Technology, Managing Director of C-Topic Consulting and inventor of Klassenkonzept-Technik®, is a software documentation pioneer and one of the leading experts in technical communication. 
She is a member of the standards group responsible for revising the 2651x series of standards. She is involved in many areas at tekom, for example on the advisory board for standards, on the editorial advisory board of 'technische 
kommunikation', on the European Academic Colloquium Review Board, as a speaker, author and reviewer.

What matters in the Design of Empirical Research for Translation Studies

With its inductive nature, empirical research is first of all intended to observe and describe one or more aspects of a phenomenon as these occur in “the real world’ (Toury, 2012, p. xi). The ultimate aim of empirical research is however ‘to use observation and description as a means to establish general principles that can explain and predict the phenomenon under investigation’ (Kotze, 2019, p.333). It follows that the design of an empirical study needs to be sound so that the means will serve the ends and the ends are justifiable by the means.

In this talk, I will discuss the conceptual contents of empirical research with a focus on the essential procedures involved in empirical research in translation. Drawing upon my own experience as an author, academic reviewer and editor of empirical studies in translation, I will then talk about issues that researchers will need to pay special attention to when they design their empirical research, from identifying a meaningful research question, to selecting research methods and finally to the extrapolation of research findings.

Caiwen Wang, University of Westminster - UK
Dr Caiwen Wang is a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting Studies
in the School of Humanities of the University of Westminster and an Associate Professor
in Translation and Interpreting at the Centre for Translation Studies of UCL, UK.
She teaches translation and interpreting at both the theoretical and the practical level.
Her research interests are translation and interpreting studies, and applied linguistics in general.
She has published in leading T&I journals, such as Perspectives,
Translation and Interpreting Studies, Across Languages and Cultures.
Her recent co-edited book Translation and Interpreting as Social Interaction:
Affect, Behaviour and Cognition by Bloomsbury (www.bloomsbury.com/9781350279315) 
is listed in the Bloomsbury Advances in Translation series, with Professor Jeremy Munday being the series' general editor. Her co-edited book Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting: The Post-Structuralist Approach by Routledge (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003017400) is listed in the Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies series.

The Process Is Not the Job: A Technical Writer's Journey in a Regulated Industry

"What does it mean for an expert technical writer to work for the first time in his career in a highly-regulated industry without any previous specific training?
This presentation will share the story of my four-and-a-half-year journey in the medical device industry—a tale of challenges, learning, and a quest to uncover the true nature of the job." 
 

Wednesday 12th of June at 3 PM 

A Framework for Understanding Cognitive Biases in Technical Communication 

The communication of technical information is often susceptible to cognitive biases. Technical communicators need to understand cognitive biases and know how to tackle them accordingly. This talk devises a framework of principles that provides technical communicators an operable affordance and a vocabulary to approach cognitive biases and to communicate empathetically.

Artificial Intelligence Literacy and Adjacent Digital Literacies for the Digitalised and Datafied Language Industry

Multimodal large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini models are general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which increase to a considerable degree the scope of human intellectual tasks that can be (semi-)automated through cognitive technologies – both in the language industry and in a wide range of other professional fields. In this “AI-saturated world” (Markauskaite et al. 2022:2), the division of labour between humans and machines is being reconfigured and new human competences are required in order to live and work in tandem with powerful AI technologies. In this talk, I will discuss a range of literacy frameworks that aim to capture an extensive set of digital competences that stakeholders require in light of the AI-fuelled automation of the language industry: 1) A professional machine translation (MT) literacy framework; 2) an MT-specific data literacy framework; 3) an artificial intelligence literacy framework for translation, interpreting, and specialised communication (cf. Krüger 2023, Krüger submitted for publication). In this context, I will also present the outcomes of the DataLitMT project (cf. Hackenbuchner/Krüger 2023), which provides training resources for developing data literacy in the context of professional MT literacy, and I will sketch the agenda of the recently established ERASMUS+ consortium LT-LiDER: Language and Translation: Literacy in Digital Environments and Resources, which will also

Prof. Dr. Ralph Krüger, University of Applied Sciences, Cologne - Germany

Ralph Krüger is Professor of Language and Translation Technology at the Institute of Translation and Multilingual Communication at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany. He received his PhD in translation studies from the University of Salford, UK, in 2014 and completed his habilitation at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in 2024. His current research focuses on the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs) in the specialised translation process and on didactic strategies and resources for teaching the technical basics of NMT/LLMs to students of translation and specialised communication programmes. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1009-3365