by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner Will AI allow test development, item banking, item localization, validation and multilingual test delivery to all happen in one integrated environment? The AI behind adaptive translation is not the same as the AI behind item generation, but they can work together to build ... Read more >
by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner Dublin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and now Athens. This was cApStAn's fourth participation in a conference of the European arm of the Association of Test Publishers (E-ATP). Why would a linguistic quality control agency participate in a test publishers' conference? A high-level conference at that, with ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In the past two decades, new standards have been defined for the adaptation of assessment instruments into multiple languages. Sophisticated translation designs have become the norm in international large scale assessments (ILSAs). However, in item development, the "Anglo-Saxon legacy" ... Read more >
by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner In some areas, AI may be a hype. Not so for neural machine translation (NMT). On a daily basis, we hear and read about the new threats and opportunities that come with new advances in artificial intelligence (AI). In the field of translation, ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Welcome to the third issue of cApStAn's monthly newsletter. For those of you who did not see the first two editions, in our newsletter we share news about recent developments in the cApStAn ecosystem as well as snippets of information ... Read more >
by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner When either the OECD or GESIS—the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences—organise a methodological seminar, it is an opportunity to learn something from authoritative sources and to test one’s working assumptions with experts from the field. When OECD and GESIS join forces to organize ... Read more >
by Steve Dept - cApStAn partner In the late nineties, Steve Dept was involved in two large-scale translation and adaptation projects. As it happens, he was particularly concerned with the time and resources spent on multiple revisions that did not seem to warrant incremental improvements in faithfulness or fluency. The ... Read more >
Two weeks ago, a complete 18th century library was discovered in Bouillon. The books, all of them over 200 years old, are in pristine condition. A miracle for bibliophiles. The 18th century was the last moment in history when it seemed possible for Encyclopedists to be well-informed about the latest developments ... Read more >
Our history class on the Middle Ages was a revelation (I remain indebted to Herman Van Bostraeten at Sint-Barbaracollege): instead of just being taught the starting point and the end point of the Dark Ages, e.g. from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 till the invention of ... Read more >