Collocaid

Biography

After many years as a full-time academic, I now focus on short-term visiting lectureships and expert consultancy within the language industry. My areas of expertise are the intersections of corpus linguistics and AI with lexicography, terminology, human and machine translation, and academic English writing.

My professional collaborations include consultancies for Oxford Languages, Harper Collins, and Reverso, as well as previous roles as lead of the Linguateca Project at Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (PT) and as an external translator for the European Parliament. 

Extensive experience as Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Surrey, Auxiliary Professor of English at Universidade Europeia (PT), and Director of the University of Surrey's flagship Master in Translation has equipped me with critical skills in research, academic publishing, higher education leadership, and teaching and supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

I have held visiting professorships at several leading universities around the world, including University Jaume I (ES), University of León (ES), University of Santiago de Compostela (ES), Nova University Lisbon (PT), São Paulo State University (BR), Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (BR) and China Pharmaceutical University (CN). In these roles, I have had the privilege of sharing my expertise and skills in a range of areas - including corpus linguistics, lexicography, terminology, human & machine translation, writing assistance, and academic English writing - with diverse multicultural audiences worldwide. 

I have demonstrated my ability to innovate and lead by conceiving and managing funded research projects in languages and linguistics, such as the COMPARA bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, the ColloCaid academic writing assistant and the Supporting the Internationalisation of Brazilian Research workshops.

My public speaking and written communication skills consist of not only presenting my work to experts, but also translating research to wider audiences through non-technical articles, blog posts, webinars, and hands-on workshops (e.g. Institute of Translation and Interpreting, the Chartered Institute of Linguists, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, the EU DG-Translation, IATEFL Voices, and Oxford Dictionaries).
 

Unique contributions to lexicography, translation and writing assistance

• Principal investigator of ColloCaid, a project funded by AHRC that combines research into user needs, lexical computing and human-computer interaction to develop a text editor that supports writers with real-time collocation suggestions.
• Principal Investigator of COMPARA, an open, 3-million-word bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, with Portuguese literary texts aligned with their published translations into English, and English literary texts aligned with their published translations into Portuguese. The COMPARA corpus has been used and cited in countless scholarly publications by translation researchers worldwide. It also has a simple search option used by the public in general.
• Chief Editor of the bilingual English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English Oxford Portuguese Dictionary, with over 70,000 headwords and more than 140,000 fully translated example sentences curated from corpora of authentic language in use, and consultant for annual updates to the online edition, available at  https://premium.oxforddictionaries.com/.
• UK Lead partner of Supporting the Internationalization of Brazilian Research, a series of workshops on the use of language and translation technologies to assist Brazilian researchers promote their research internationally, while simultaneously training academic English tutors in Brazil.

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