Dr Félix do Carmo
About
Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Natural Language Processing, working on the application of natural language processing, machine learning, machine translation and assisted translation technologies in translation research, teaching and practice. Before joining the University of Surrey, I spent over 20 years as a translator, reviser, translation company owner, translator trainer, university lecturer and translation conference organiser in Porto, Portugal. In 2017, I moved to Ireland, to work for two years as a full-time post-doctoral researcher at the ADAPT Centre in Dublin City University, where I carried out research related to translation technology.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
News
In the media
ResearchResearch interests
My research is framed by Applied Translation Studies, with a special focus on the automation of translation processes. My interests encompass translation process research, the complexity of translation data and human and economic factors of the translation industry, both in theoretical and empirical approaches.
Research projects
KAITER – Knowledge-Assisted Interactive Translation, Editing and RevisingKAITER aims at studying the development of a translation editor that supports the work of translators by estimating and suggesting their editing actions, integrated into a system that helps them manage their specialisation. This research is focused on the interconnection between tools used by translators and machine translation, a technology that tries to emulate their work. The objective of the project comes from the notion that, for us to leverage all the capabilities of this technology, this should be employed as a support tool for translators.
Research interests
My research is framed by Applied Translation Studies, with a special focus on the automation of translation processes. My interests encompass translation process research, the complexity of translation data and human and economic factors of the translation industry, both in theoretical and empirical approaches.
Research projects
KAITER aims at studying the development of a translation editor that supports the work of translators by estimating and suggesting their editing actions, integrated into a system that helps them manage their specialisation. This research is focused on the interconnection between tools used by translators and machine translation, a technology that tries to emulate their work. The objective of the project comes from the notion that, for us to leverage all the capabilities of this technology, this should be employed as a support tool for translators.
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
I am interested in supporting research projects that open up Translation Studies to challenging new areas, often crossing boundaries between disciplines, with a special focus on improving the interaction between people and technologies in multilingual contexts. I see my role as incentivising students and researchers to work on research that is applicable to real use cases, by developing acute observation and critical thinking skills, supported by strong theoretical knowledge and solid research methodologies.
I am currently co-supervising three PhD projects:
- Gustavo Zomer's PhD project: Translating science: developing an context-aware real-time writing assistant to support Brazilian researchers publishing in English (main supervisor: Dr Ana Frankenberg-Garcia)
- Eleanor Taylor-Stilgoe's PhD project: Use and Impact of Machine Translation in Healthcare Settings (main supervisor: Prof Constantin Orasan)
- Shenbin Qian's PhD project: Sentiment preservation in neural machine translation (main supervisor: Prof Constantin Orasan)
I have supervised 2 MA dissertations in 2019/2020, one of which was awarded the prize for best dissertation in the MA Translation that year. I have supervised 3 MA dissertations in 2020/2021.
Teaching
Current year (2021-2022):
- Module Leader: Translation as Human-Computer Interaction (TRAM476) - 1st semester
- Module Leader: Professional Translation Practice II (TRAM494) - 2nd semester
I also collaborate in the following modules:
- Principles and Challenges of Translation and Interpreting (TRAM495) - 1st semester
- Business and Management in Translation (TRAM499) - 2nd semester
- Smart Technologies for Translation (TRAM502) - 2nd semester
Previous years:
- Specialist Translation I - Portuguese (TRAM488)
- Specialist Translation II - Portuguese (TRAM489)
- Translation Technologies (TRAM428)
- Business and Industry Aspects of the Translation Profession (TRAM476)
Publications
Highlights
Chapters in books
do Carmo, Félix, and Belinda Maia. 2015. Sleeping with the enemy? Or should translators work with Google Translate? in Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, Olga Torres-Hostench, Bartolomé Mesa-Lao (eds). Conducting Research in Translation Technologies. New Trends in Translation Studies. vol. 13. Peter Lang.
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
Conference proceedings
Shterionov, Dimitar, Félix do Carmo, and Joachim Wagner. 2019. “APE through Neural and Statistical MT with Augmented Data - ADAPT/DCU Submission to the WMT 2019 APE Shared Task.” In Proceedings of ACL 2019 - WMT Shared Task on Automatic Post-Editing. Firenze, Italy.
Shterionov, Dimitar, Félix do Carmo, Joss Moorkens, Eric Pacquin, Dag Schmidtke, Declan Groves, and Andy Way. 2019. “When Less Is More in Neural Quality Estimation of Machine Translation - an Industry Case.” In Proceedings of the MT Summit XVII. Dublin.
do Carmo, Félix. 2019 ‘Edit distances do not describe editing, but they can be useful for translation process research’, in Carl, M. and Hansen-Schirra, S. (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd MEMENTO workshop on Modelling Parameters of Cognitive Effort in Translation Production. Dublin, Ireland. pp. 1–2. (Abstract)
do Carmo, Félix. 2018. “Does Machine Translation Really Produce Translations?” In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation - Translator’s Track, edited by Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Maja Popović, Célia Rico Pérez, André Martins, Joachim Van den Bogaert, and Mikel L. Forcada, 323. Alicante, Spain: EAMT. p. 323. (Abstract).
do Carmo, Félix, Luís Trigo, and Belinda Maia. 2016. From CATs to KATs. in Proceedings of the 38th Conference Translating and the Computer. London, UK: Editions Tradulex, Geneva. pp. 149–158.
do Carmo, Félix, and Belinda Maia. 2016. “A Description of Post-Editing, from Translation Studies to Machine Learning.” In Tradumàtica Research Group (eds.). Translators and Machine Translation: Book of presentations. Barcelona, Spain. pp. 126-152.
This paper summarises the submissions our team, SURREY-CTS-NLP has made for the WASSA 2022 Shared Task for the prediction of empathy, distress and emotion. In this work, we tested different learning strategies, like ensemble learning and multi-task learning, as well as several large language models, but our primary focus was on analysing and extracting emotion-intensive features from both the essays in the training data and the news articles, to better predict empathy and distress scores from the perspective of discourse and sentiment analysis. We propose several text feature extraction schemes to compensate the small size of training examples for fine-tuning pretrained language models, including methods based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing, cosine similarity and sentiment score. Our best submissions achieve an average Pearson correlation score of 0.518 for the empathy prediction task and an F1 score of 0.571 for the emotion prediction task(1), indicating that using these schemes to extract emotion-intensive information can help improve model performance.
This dataset includes the data collected as part of the projects JAS, a study on the effects of automation of a job allocation system in a translation services company. The dataset includes counts of answers to a questionnaire answered by 38 participants. Answers are classified according to closed classes in closed questions, and thematic codes in answers to open questions. See readme file for more details and read the article "From responsibilities to responsibility: a study of the effects of translation workflow automation", due to be published in JoSTrans, Issue 40 (July 2023).
The amazing capacities of machine translation are supported by very rigorous and powerful research. However, science is also discourse, and sometimes scientific discourse creates myths, beliefs that are based on how terms and concepts may be used in scientific publications with no proper debate or understanding. In this lecture, I will present a critical view of three of the most influential papers from machine translation research, not criticising their scientific validity, but highlighting how their use of terms and concepts helped create myths around the power of machine translation. My perspective is that translation is much more complex than what common discourses about machine translation convey, and that we are losing sight of that complexity when we focus on the scientific achievements. My objective is to contribute to real convergence between machine translation research and translation studies by presenting a view that aims at solving current limitations of discussions about translation. I believe that real convergence can only be fruitful if translation studies contributes to the debate, bringing with it the power of a rich legacy of theories and practices that help us all understand the complexity of translation.
Additional publications
In Portuguese:
do Carmo, Félix. 2004. Saberes e Criatividade em acção na Tradução Técnica (Knowledge and Creativity in Technical Translation). in Revista Génesis – revista científica do ISAI. (2004_3). Porto: ISAI.
do Carmo, Félix. 2002. De Formando a Formador, passando por 'Formado em Tradução’ (From trainee to trainer, from someone with translation training’) in Actas do V Seminário de Tradução Científica e Técnica em Língua Portuguesa - Novos Empregos para os Tradutores?. Lisboa: União Latina.
do Carmo, Félix. 2000. “Onde está a Saída? - Perspectivas Profissionais do Curso de Tradução da FLUP” (Where is the exit? Professional Perspectives for the Translation degree of FLUP) in Actas do II Seminário de Tradução Científica e Técnica em Língua Portuguesa – A tradução científica e técnica em língua portuguesa. Lisboa: União Latina.