Two representatives from Hamad Bin Khalifa University gave presentations at this week’s Globalisation and Localisation Association (GALA 2017) conference in Amsterdam, an event organised by the world’s leading trade association for the language industry.

Nada Melhem from the Translation and Interpretation Institute (TII) and Majd Abbar from the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) presented their ideas at the event recently.

Melhem’s short talk, titled ‘Creating a Remote Interpreting Unit for Education City (Qatar)’, explored the rationale behind the creation of such a unit, the challenges and difficulties faced during the planning phase, the phases leading to the pilot remote interpreting session, and what needs to be done to change the mindset of interpreters and event organisers about the effectiveness and usefulness of remote interpreting compared to other traditional interpreting equipment.

Abbar’s master class included presentations of the full suite of advanced Arabic language technologies, specifically NLP, machine translation, segmentation, parsing, normalisation, diacritisation, speech recognition among others and some of the implementations in real-world solutions, and the reliance on machine learning for all the technologies presented.

Abbar said that QCRI is one of the top research institutes around the world dealing with Arabic language technologies and he said he was pleased to showcase the technologies at the biggest language solutions conference.

The Globalisation and Localisation Association (GALA) is the world’s leading trade association for the language industry supporting member companies and the language sector by creating communities, championing standards, sharing knowledge, and advancing technology. Its vision is to be the voice for the language industry and the resource for the language enterprise.