Anna Aguilar-Amat

Machine Translation Discussed With Young People

The aim of the Fira de Recerca en Directe 2015 (Live Research Fair) held at the Barcelona science museum CosmoCaixa is to encourage young people in our country to take up scientific careers. At each stand, students were presented with a scientific enigma and were encouraged to find the answer to it through conversations with researchers and through experiments using laboratory equipment. At the Tradumàtica Research Group’s stand, we presented research we have been carrying out in Machine Translation (MT) and MT postediting. Traditionally, scientific outreach programs have a unidirectional format from researchers to the citizenry. However, our experiences at the Fair on the perception young people have of MT clearly show a bidirectional interaction between researchers and the young people, and this experience helped us come up with ideas to improve our research.