Geneviève Patenaude


2009

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Up close and personal with a Translator – How Translators Really Work
Alain Desilets | UQO | Geneviève Patenaude
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XII: Tutorials

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How Translators Use Tools and Resources to Resolve Translation Problems: an Ethnographic Study
Alain Désilets | Christiane Melançon | Geneviève Patenaude | Louise Brunette
Beyond Translation Memories: New Tools for Translators Workshop

2008

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Reliable Innovation: A Tecchie’s Travels in the Land of Translators
Alain Désilets | Louise Brunette | Christiane Melançon | Geneviève Patenaude
Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Government and Commercial Uses of MT

Machine Translation (MT) is rapidly progressing towards quality levels that might make it appropriate for broad user populations in a range of scenarios, including gisting and post-editing in unconstrained domains. For this to happen, the field may however need to switch gear and move away from its current technology driven paradigm to a more user-centered approach. In this paper, we discuss how ethnographic techniques like Contextual Inquiry could help in that respect, by providing researchers and developers with rich information about the world and needs of potential end-users. We discuss how data from Contextual Inquiries with professional translators was used to concretely and positively influence several research and development projects in the area of Computer Assisted Translation technology. These inquiries had many benefits, including: (i) grounding developers and researchers in the world of their end-users, (ii) generating new technology ideas, (iii) selecting between competing development project ideas, (iv) finding how to alleviate friction for important ideas that go against the grain of current user practices, (v) evaluating existing or experimental technologies, (vi) helping with micro level design decision, (vii) building credibility with translators, and (viii) fostering multidisciplinary discussion between researchers.