The 2025 JIAMCATT meeting, which had the theme of ‘Minds & machines: solving the quality puzzle’, emphasised the need for systems in which human expertise and machine capabilities work together to enhance quality while addressing specific constraints. Professionals were encouraged to ‘design frameworks for the future that foster innovation, foresight, and resilience, while supporting skills development and teamwork’.
JIAMCATT (the International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology) serves as a forum for debate and the exchange of expertise and cooperation. The 2025 conference took place at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva from 7 to 9 April. A total of 184 people attended in person and 170 joined online.
The conference was chaired by Hannah Riley and introduced by Blanca Pinero from WTO. In her keynote speech, Michelle Keating, Chief of the Languages Service at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), expressed her inspiring views by creating a special framework for language services: FIRST, which stands for foresight, innovation, resilience, skills, and teamwork.
This was followed by 12 presentations, live demos, one workshop, and a panel discussion. Terminology was the focus, particularly in relation to AI and semantic technology for term extraction, definition drafting, and document classification. Experiments were conducted to measure the quality of machine translation (MT) and the need for machine translation post-editing (MTPE), while others evaluated the integration of text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in post-editing tasks. The use of AI for quality evaluation was also experimented with in the areas of revision, automatic speech translation (AST), and interpreter assessments.
The workshop focused on quality issues and problems professionals encounter, the origins of these issues – are they human- or machine-related? – as well as the aspects that could improve quality and provide solutions. Participants proposed solutions ranging from knowledge sharing and relying more on collective intelligence to feeding machines with higher-quality data, using context-specific tools, and developing MT and QA tools for languages with fewer resources.
During the panel discussion on ‘Minds, machines, and new tools’, the panellists shared their views on the busy and somewhat turbulent working environment in which language professionals must operate. FIT called for increased awareness of the risks associated with certain working practices and contexts, as well as the creation and delivery of new, suitable professional development and training opportunities.
A poll was conducted to which 68 people responded. In response to the question, ‘Is your organisation still recruiting language professionals?’, 44% responded, ‘Yes, we are recruiting’, 28% ‘Yes, although we are not recruiting at present’, 25% ‘No, we are not recruiting’, and 3% ‘I don’t know’. Participants were then asked, ‘What profiles is your organisation recruiting?’ Answers ranged from versatile translators with good IT, localisation, and document formatting skills to post-editors, revisers, proofreaders, interpreters, project managers, lawyer linguists, language technology specialists, editorial assistants, and communications professionals. In today’s evolving technological landscape, adaptability and versatility remain core skills for language professionals.
Pascale Elbaz, Chair, FIT Research Taskforce