Keynote Address

From the Rosetta Stone to AI: The Human Drive to Decipher

When pressed to define what sets humans apart from the rest of the world, anthropologists use words like "language," "curiosity," sometimes "humor," and "work."

Translators and interpreters are the very embodiment of those traits. The passion for foreign languages, the drive to bridge the familiar and the foreign, is what makes people frequently ask us: How do you do that?

Major turns in history are always linked to translation. The roots of the Renaissance, for example, are found in a few great schools of translation. One of them was the Toledo School of Translators in 12th-century Spain. Jews, Muslims, and Christians collaborated to unlock the wisdom of antiquity. Another remarkable event was the race to decipher hieroglyphics at the turn of the 19th century, unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt, often dubbed the "mother of civilization."

Toledo, the Renaissance, and Egyptology were seminal to modern linguistics. We’ll explore the constants that pervade the many steps and branches of linguistics: sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, comparative linguistics, and, of course, today’s computational linguistics. That will help us understand the challenges, breakthroughs, and limitations of modern machine translation and AI. By doing so, we hope to shed a new light on the technology we use every day.

Yves Champollion was born 1956 in Paris, France. He is related to the early 19th-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, whose contributions to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics were instrumental in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. He freelanced as a translator between 1982 and 1995, when he translated and published the French versions of several popular science books that were bestsellers in the U.S., including Darwin On Trial by P.E. Johnson. From 1996 to 1999, he was a project manager and consultant for large translation projects at world-class translation agencies (Translatel, Linguex), which led to his involvement in projects for SAP R/3 & R/4, Siemens, Alcatel, Microsoft, IBM, ABB, and Ford, to name a few.

Widely traveled, in addition to French, Classical Latin, German, English, Russian, and some Japanese, he has also had time to get acquainted with Shangana, a language spoken in Mozambique, where he sponsors a secondary school. He is also an enthusiastic conference speaker, having delivered countless keynote addresses and lectures throughout his career, and particularly since he launched the Wordfast line of products for the translation industry.