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

Ms. Nada Melhem from the Translation and Interpretation Institute (TII) and Mr. Majd Abbar from the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) presented their ideas at the event on Tuesday (March 28).  

Ms. 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 organizers about the effectiveness and usefulness of remote interpreting compared to other traditional interpreting equipment. 

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

“QCRI is one of the top research institutes around the world dealing with Arabic language technologies, so I was pleased to showcase these technologies at the biggest language solutions conference,” Mr. Abbar said. “There was great interest in what was presented.” 

The Globalization and Localization 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.