Full-time academic position in translation and artificial intelligence

Job description

The School of Translation and Interpreting (ISTI-Cooremans) of the Faculty of Letters, Translation and Communication at ULB is opening a chair in translation and artificial intelligence.

The holder of the chair is expected to take on teaching activities and will actively develop research in line with the research axes defined by the faculty’s research centres. The position comes along with an equivalent of at least 4 years of doctoral grants, reserved for PhD candidates to be supervised by the holder of the chair.

Courses taught by the holder of the chair will focus on theoretical, professional, legal, ethical and societal aspects relating to translation and interpreting in the age neural machine translation and artificial intelligence.

In the master’s programme, he or she is expected to teach students how to create, develop and maintain terminological databases and how to train and evaluate machine translation systems.

The holder of the chair will teach students how machine translation works, in order to provide them with the skills and insights that are necessary to effectively use machine translation.

All research and teaching activities will concentrate on both theoretical and applied aspects of translation and interpreting.

Main Research Field: Language Sciences 

Sub Research Field: Translation and Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing

Teaching and scientific objectives

The holder of the chair is expected to develop research and teach several courses at the translation and interpreting department. The holder of the chair will have to supervise master’s and PhD theses. The holder of the chair will contribute to collaborative projects, develop teaching materials and apply for internal and external research grants.

Courses included in the teaching assignment at the time of recruitment:

BA1 (core curriculum course) - Ethical and societal aspects of machine translation – 24h

MA1 (core curriculum course) - Creation and use of multilingual corpora – 24h

MA 1 (obligatory course in localisation and project management module) - Training and evaluating MT systems – 24h 

In total, the holder of the chair is expected to teach 120 hours per academic year.  In addition to these three courses, The holder of the chair will therefore have to  propose and design  courses in line with their research interests, the research axes defined by the department’s research centres and the department’s study programmes.

Required qualifications

PhD in Linguistics, communication science and/or translation studies or any other domain closely related to machine translation.

Required skills

- The candidate must have at least 4 years of scientific seniority at the time of recruitment.

- The candidate has conducted post-doctoral research and has an excellent scientific record.

- Pre- and post-doctoral international mobility experience is considered a plus.

- Core curriculum courses must be taught in French both in the bachelor’s and master’s programme.  A 3-year transition period may be granted to candidates whose mastery of French does not yet reach the C2 proficiency level at the time of recruitment.

- The candidate has demonstrable expert knowledge in the abovementioned research domains and can establish links with professional translation practices.

- The candidate has experience with multilingual data processing and has a keen interest in modern languages and translation.

- The candidate must have higher education or university teaching experience and excellent pedagogical skills.

- The candidate will show initiative and be able to work as part of a team to coordinate teaching and research activities.

Required Languages:

Français : excellent 

English : excellent 

Interested ?

For more information, please contact Frédéric Lohest (frederic.lohest@ulb.be ).

Applications must be sent by e-mail to the Rectorate of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (rectrice@ulb.be) and to Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Translation and Communication (Doyen.LTC@ulb.be).

The application dossier must contain:

• an application letter;
• a Curriculum vitae including a list of publications:

1. an online template is available at https://www.ulb.be/fr/documents-officiels/completer-votre-cv-en-ligne.  Once completed, it must be downloaded and added to the application dossier.

• a 7,000-character report, spaces included, in French (4 pages) presenting the applicant’s research activities and a research project in the domain of multilingualism, translation and artificial intelligence, detailing how Tradital’s primary research axes can be further developed;
• a teaching dossier including a 7,000-character report, spaces included, in French (4 pages) on the applicant's previous teaching activities and a teaching project for the first three years in this position; candidates must explain how they aim to contribute meaningfully to the existing undergraduate and master's programmes.
• a note on the applicant's international achievements and projects (maximum 4 pages) (in French or in English);
• the names and e-mail addresses of five referees (the list must be gender-balanced) who may be contacted by members of the selection committee .  All possible conflicts of interest, arising from personal or familial ties, must be avoided. 

Equal opportunities policy

ULB's personnel management policy is geared towards diversity and equal opportunities.

We recruit candidates on the basis of their skills, irrespective of age, gender, sexual orientation, origin, nationality, beliefs, disability, etc.

Would you like to be provided with reasonable accommodation in the selection procedure because of a disability, disorder, or illness?  Please contact Marie Botty, the person in charge of diversity aspects for the academic and scientific staff (marie.botty@ulb.be). Be assured of the confidentiality of this information.

More details on the ULB gender and diversity policy are available at https://www.ulb.be/en/about-ulb/gender-equality-at-ulb. 

You will find all the regulations relating to academic careers on our site at http://www.ulb.ac.be/emploi/academique.html.

Reference : 2024/A016

Application deadline : 29/02/2024

Start date: 01/10/2024