Third Mission

The University of Vienna is committed to having a positive impact on society by translating academic research into practical implementations. Within HAITrans, there are several ways in which we have been sharing our expertise with the wider community of translators, translator trainers, and language service providers:

Collaborations with the European Union Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and International Organisations

Univ.-Prof. Ciobanu represents the ZTW in the IAMLADP Universities' Contact Group (UCG). This forum acts as a liaison point for the further development of co-operation between international organizations and universities. It also has a mandate for bridging the gap between IOs and academia, and for sharing expertise through joint Train the Trainers sessions. Within this framework, HAITrans initiated and delivered events such as the 2022 full training day in Machine Translation for in-house translators, managers, and revisers from the United Nations Vienna (UNOV) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at UN Vienna and the 2024 online two-day Training for Translators’ Trainers seminar. 

Univ.-Prof. Ciobanu also delivered training sessions to the Austrian Armed Forces Language Institute, as well as the CEDC linguists, professional associations such as Universitas and the Chartered Institute of Linguists, individual IOs such as the ECB, EU Commission and Parliament officials, as well as members of the Translation Centre For the Bodies of the EU (CdT) through the Interinstitutional Workshop on Speech Recognition organised by the European Union Interinstitutional Committee for Translation and Interpretation. He also has a longstanding collaboration with the European Commission's in-house translation service in the area of translating, revising and post-editing machine translation output with speech technologies.

Given the above collaborations, Univ.-Prof. Ciobanu was invited to join the JIAMCATT Liaison Committee, the only academic representative. JIAMCATT , the "International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology", established as a IAMLADP task force, provides its participants with a forum for debate, exchange of expertise and cooperation in the fields of computer-assisted terminology and translation, interpretation and documentation retrieval. JIAMCATT membership includes most international organizations (UN, EU, NATO, ECB), as well as various national institutions and academic bodies, active in the field of terminology and translation.

Shaping the future of translator training within both the industry and academia

Univ.-Prof. Dragoș Ciobanu is an active member of two Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) Special Interest Groups (SIGs): the Machine Translation Post-Editing Training SIG and the Global Talent SIG, as well as the EDUinLOC initiative of LocalizationWorld (LocWorld). Prof. Ciobanu is also a member of the Founding Advisory Board for Translation Commons. 

At the same time, Prof. Ciobanu is involved in the European Masters in Translation (EMT) Working Group (WG) on Translation Tools and Technologies.