Monday, November 1

“What in the World Is Everybody Talking About?” Nicholas Hartmann, Technical and Scientific Translator, President of the American Translators Association 2009-2011

Nicholas Hartmann earned BA and MA degrees in 1973 and his PhD in 1982; he began working full-time as an independent technical and scientific translator in 1984, and now specializes in translating patents and related documents for corporate clients and law firms in the US and Europe. He is currently President of the American Translators Association, and has also served the Association as President-elect and conference organizer, Director, and Secretary; administrator of the Science and Technology Division; chair of the Client Education Committee, Governance and Communications Committee, and Science and Technology Information Committee; co-chair of the Business Practices Education Committee; and member of the Terminology Committee and the ATA Chronicle Editorial Board. Dr. Hartmann holds ATA certification in French–English, German–English and Italian–English.

"HIC SVNT DRACONES! Encountering the Unknown: When Machine and Human Translators Meet" Jost Zetzsche, Freelance Translator, Author



Jost Zetzsche is an English to German translator, a localization and translation consultant, and a widely published author of books and articles on technical aspects of translation. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he earned a Ph.D. in the field of Chinese translation history and linguistics, and began working in localization and technical translation in 1997. In 1999, he co-founded International Writers’ Group on the Oregon coast. In 2008 he co-launched TranslatorsTraining.com a site that offer in-depth comparisons of translation tools. His computer guide for translators, A Translator's Tool Box for the 21st Century, was published in 2003.

Jost currently sends out a free, biweekly technical newsletter for translators (see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit ).

Tuesday, November 2

“What in the World Is Everybody Talking About?” Paul Bremer, AppTek

Ambassador L Paul Bremer, III has had a unique blend of experience in government and the private sector.  His most recent government position was as the Presidential Envoy to Iraq. There he was responsible for Coalition efforts to start rebuilding the country’s shattered political and economic structure. His best-selling book, My Year in Iraq:  The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope tells of the challenges he and his colleagues faced there.

Ambassador Bremer’s mission to Iraq marked his return to government after a 14 year career in business and 23 years in the State Department. Prior to his assignment to Iraq, Ambassador Bremer had been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marsh Crisis Consulting Company, a firm providing crisis management advice and training to corporate boards and CEOs.   From 1989 to 2000, he was Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, a strategic consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger providing CEOs advice and assistance on geopolitical matters.

During this period, Ambassador Bremer also served as a director of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Akzo Nobel NV, Vivid Technologies, Conner Peripherals, the Harvard Business School Club of New York and The Netherland-America Foundation. He was a Trustee of the Economic Club of New York and on the International Advisory Boards of two Japanese firms, Komatsu and Chugai Pharmaceuticals. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

Ambassador Bremer’s 23-year career in the State Department spanned eight Presidencies and during this time, he served as Special Assistant or Executive Assistant to six Secretaries of State. His overseas assignments included service at the Embassies in Afghanistan and Malawi and as Deputy Ambassador at the American Embassy in Norway.

President Reagan named him as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1983 where he served for three years. Ambassador Bremer was Ambassador at Large for Counter Terrorism in the second Reagan Administration, charged with formulating and implementing the nation’s counter-terrorism policies.

Ambassador Bremer is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on terrorism and homeland security. In September 1999, the Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him Chairman of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism.  In June 2002, President Bush appointed Ambassador Bremer to the President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. He also participated in the National Academy of Science Commission examining the role of science and technology in countering terrorism.  He chaired a Heritage Foundation study, “Defending the Homeland” and participated in studies leading to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security.

Ambassador Bremer has received numerous awards for his public service. On December 14, 2004, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, for his service in Iraq. He was also presented with the Department of Defense award for Distinguished Public Service and the Nixon Library honored him with the "Victory of Freedom Award" for "demonstrating leadership and working towards peace and freedom."  During his time in government, Ambassador Bremer received the State Department Superior Honor Award, two Presidential Meritorious Service Awards and the Distinguished Honor Award from the Secretary of State.

Ambassador Bremer is the Founder and President of the Lincoln/Douglass Scholarship Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit organization providing high school scholarships to inner city youths.  He serves on the Board of Catholic Charities of Washington and is a Director of the National Fybromyalgia Association and World Team Sports, a non-profit that organizes athletic events for disabled Americans.  This summer, he accompanied a group of wounded warriors in a 4,000 mile bicycle ride across America to honor their service to the country.

Ambassador Bremer received his B.A. from Yale University, a CEP from the Institut D’Etudes Politiques of the University of Paris, and an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He has an Honorary Doctor of Law degree from Ave Maria University. His languages are French, Dutch, and Norwegian.

"Ten Years of MT: A Commercial Case Study" Mark Lancaster, SDL Group

Mark Lancaster founded the SDL Group in 1992, having identified the need for a high-level and comprehensive service and technology provider for the globalization of companies’ content and products. Mark was previously employed as a design engineer at Satchwell Control Systems before he progressed his career to Lotus Development Corporation and later as International Development Director with Ashton-Tate. He is responsible for the strategic development of the Group.

Wednesday, November 3

"Impacts on the Enterprise Language Services. Disruptive or Evolutionary?" Jaap van der Meer, Director of TAUS (Translation Automation Users Society) and TDA (TAUS Data Association)

Jaap van der Meer is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company in The Netherlands in 1980. In 1987 his company INK published the first desktop term extraction and translation memory software. He inspired and funded the founding meetings of the Localization Industry Standards Association. He was president and CEO of ALPNET one of the first and most successful NASDAQ listed translation companies. Jaap is a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies and translation and globalization trends. He is director of TAUS, an industry think tank, and the TAUS Data Association, a global language data sharing initiative.

"EuroMatrixPlus - Bringing Machine Translation to the User" Philipp Koehn, Reader, University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics

Philipp Koehn is a reader at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California, where he was a research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) from 1997 to 2003. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2004, and joined the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in 2005. His research centers on statistical machine translation, but he has also worked on speech in 1999 at AT&T Research Labs and text classification in 2000 at Whizbang Labs.

Besides his research, his major contributions to the machine translation community are the preparation and release of the Europarl corpus, as well as the Pharaoh and Moses decoder --- all of which are widely used. The statistical machine translation that was developed under his leadership over the last years is one of the top performers in recent DARPA, IWSLT and WMT competitions. He has been organising a series of workshops on statistical machine translation at the ACL conferences with a shared task concerning the translation between European languages. He is president of the ACL Special Interest Group on Machine Translation and author of the textbook "Statistical Machine Translation". His research is funded by DARPA (GALE project) and the European Commission (EuroMatrix, EuroMatrixPlus, and LetsMT projects).

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Last updated: October 20, 2010