NITS 2025 Group Photo

On the 6th of June 2025, Tilburg University hosted the 4th edition of the NITS workshop. The Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies (NITS) in the Netherlands and Flanders aims to bring researchers in Translation Studies and related disciplines—such as Interpreting Studies, Machine Translation, and Translation Technology—together to discuss ongoing research and new ideas. This annual one-day workshop facilitates knowledge exchange and was this year hosted at Tilburg University and organized by the ISMT group.

The NITS 2025 workshop gathered 40 participants and featured 10 presentations, 13 posters, and a panel discussion on education and LLMs. For the first time in the NITS series, a Master Thesis Award was also presented.

🎤 Presentation Highlights

  • Opening Presentation: “Priming LLMs for Domain-Specific Machine Translation via In-context Learning and Quality Estimation”
    by Javad Pourmostafa, based on the AMTA 2024 paper authored by Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Dimitar Shterionov, and Pieter Spronck.

  • Poster by Chiara Manna: “Are We Paying Attention to Her?”
    Investigating gender disambiguation and attention in MT. This work appears in GITT 2025 proceedings and was co-authored with Afra Alishahi, Frédéric Blain, and Eva Vanmassenhove.

  • Presentation by Dimitar Shterionov: “Environmental Considerations for Digital Translation Technology”
    Co-authored with Eva Vanmassenhove, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, and Elena Murgolo. To appear in The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technology and Society.

  • Talk by Lisa Lepp: “Co-Creation for Sign Language Machine Translation”
    Based on her recent papers co-authored with Dimitar Shterionov, Mirella De Sisto, and Grzegorz Chrupała.

🧠 Panel on Education and Generative AI

The afternoon panel on Education and Generative AI discussed how to train future translators and students to use LLMs effectively. Moderated by Ana Guerberof-Arenas, the panel included:

  • Vincent Vandeghinste (INT)
  • Lieve Maken (UGent)
  • Bram Vanroy (KULeuven, INT)
  • Aletta (Lettie) Dorst (Leiden University)
  • Eva Vanmassenhove (Tilburg University)

The discussion was engaging and highlighted multiple perspectives across academia and practice.

📍 What’s Next?

The next edition of the NITS workshop will take place in Brussels, hosted by the TRADITAL team at Université libre de Bruxelles.

We look forward to seeing you there!