The third webinar in AIIC UK & Ireland’s series of webinars on Artificial Intelligence and the Interpreter, entitled With a Little Help From My Friends. AI for Interpreter Training and Support , took place on 11 December 2020 and addressed a question of great interest to practising interpreters and trainers: how can AI tools support our work in the booth?

Once again, we attracted a large audience: 500 people from all over the world had registered for the event, the vast majority of whom were interpreters and nearly a quarter were interpreter trainers, curious to understand how AI tools would affect interpreting school curricula in the future.

Our first speaker was Dr Ildikó Horváth, President of the European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI), a consortium of schools training interpreters who go on to work for the European Union institutions. Ildikó herself heads the Department of Translation and Interpreting at ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary. Ildikó treated us to a tour of the AI tools already available to interpreters, focusing particularly on terminology management systems, and how they can support interpreters as they both prepare for and interpret at assignments. 

Marc van Dommelen, Head of Documentation and Terminology at DG SCIC, the Directorate-General for Interpretation at the European Commission , introduced us to the “Interpreter’s Digital Toolbox” project, explaining how it can create new opportunities for interpreters both outside and inside the booth. He referred attendees to the Knowledge Centre on Interpretation, an initiative by the European Commission to create a community space to share knowledge and disseminate best practices on conference interpreting.

Participant polling during the event demonstrated great enthusiasm for a little help from AI friends, with 86% saying that they would welcome the availability of AI tools to support their work in the booth. Asked how they thought AI tools could help them most, 43% voted for figures, while 35% chose technical or specialised terms. 

A lively question-and-answer session followed. Participants were keen to understand whether the tools would prove to be distracting in the booth, and were curious to know whether trainee interpreters were still being taught traditional interpreting skills with a notepad and pencil. Ildikó stated that students should only be introduced to AI tools once they had mastered the fundamental principles of interpreting. The notepad and pencil may have been replaced by a tablet and stylus, but the skills of analysis, note-taking and speech delivery are still essential to the training process.

The AIIC UK & Ireland organising team - Françoise Comte, Louise Jarvis, Monika Kokoszycka, Stefanie MacDonald, Deborah Muylle and Monica Robiglio – would like to thank the two speakers for sharing their expertise with us. The Bureau was also grateful for words of encouragement from attendees stating that AIIC, which represents professional interpreters, and institutions like EMCI, which advocate for quality professional interpreting training, ought to be celebrated for embracing new technologies and seeking to harness their full potential for the benefit of our profession, rather than rejecting them, fearing them or fighting against them.  

We hope you will join us for the next instalments of the webinar series on 8 January 2021 for  How Soon Is Now? Automated Speech Translation Solutions and Devices with demos of devices already on the market.

And our webinar series concludes with a panel discussion on 15 January 2021: Under Pressure. AI and Interpreting in the Future: Disruption, Perception and Reality .