Dr Jürgen Trouvain has received a "test of time" best paper award for his publication "The German Text-to-Speech Synthesis System MARY: A Tool for Research, Development and Teaching", published at the Speech Synthesis Workshop 2001 (with Dr. Marc Schröder, then DFKI, now at Google Zürich, as the first author). The paper is being honoured, among other things, for describing the popular MaryTTS system, one of the few open-source text-to-speech systems in widespread use. SSW is the series of Speech Synthesis Workshops held under the auspices of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). To celebrate the 10th anniversary of SSW the organisers of SSW 2019 in Vienna arranged a voting among their advisory board asking for the most important paper of each of the past SSW workshops.

Congratulations to both authors!

Dr. Antoine Venant has accepted an assistant professor position at the Department of Linguistics and Translation of the University of Montreal, starting October 1. Antoine joined the LST department in November 2016, as a postdoc in Alexander Koller's group. He has worked on a range of topics in theoretical computational linguistics, ranging from algebraic methods for semantic parsing to game-theoretic models of rationality in dialogue. As part of his new duty at Montreal University, he will be teaching computational linguistics and semantics.

We congratulate him and wish him all the best for his new position!

The European Union has granted a third funding period to the European Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT). Beginning with intake 2020, the program will offer Erasmus Mundus scholarships for both European and non-European students. The grant will fund four intakes of students and visiting scholars, until 2025. There are 22 scholarships per year with 5 scholarships for EU citizens and 17 scholarships for non-EU citizens.

The LCT Masters program has been a successful part of the MSc landscape in Saarbrücken since 2006 and was already funded by the Erasmus Mundus Program from 2007 to 2011 and from 2013 to 2017. It is distributed across a consortium of seven European universities in Saarbrücken, Prague, Nancy, Trento, Malta, Groningen, and the Basque Country.

Many thanks to the involved members of the UdS: Prof. Dr. Josef van Genabith - Coordinator, Dr. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová - Project Manager, Dr. Jürgen Trouvain - Local Coordinator for UdS, Bobbye Pernice - Administrative Manager and Dr. Johannes Abele - Head of the International Office.

For detailed information about LCT see LCT-Info and LCT-Master.

Unser Studienkoordinator und -fachberater Dr. Stefan Thater wurde dank seiner hervorragenden Leistungen für die Fachrichtung mit Wirkung zum 1. August zum Akademischen Oberrat ernannt. Seit 2012 betreut Stefan Thater als Studienkoordinator der Fachrichtung die Studiengänge B.Sc. Computerlinguistik und M.Sc. Language Science and Technology, nachdem er zuvor als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl Manfred Pinkal gearbeitet hat. Seit 2014 ist Stefan Thater zudem PI im SFB 1102 Information Density and Linguistic Encoding.

Wir gratulieren!

Mit dem Study Finder: Erwartungscheck können Studienbewerberinnen und Studienbewerber, die sich für den Bachelor-Studiengang "Language Science" interessieren in Erfahrung bringen, wie zutreffend Ihre Vorstellungen vom diesem Studiengang sind. Sie erhalten eine individuelle Rückmeldung mit Informationen zu den Inhalten, Anforderungen und späteren Berufsmöglichkeiten. Die Bearbeitung dauert ca. 20-30 Minuten.

Hier kann der Study Finder: Erwartungscheck gestartet werden.

Das Sepia-Bewerbungsportal für den Kernbereich-Master-Studiengang "Translation Science and Technology" - Studienbeginn WS 2019/20 - ist ab sofort freigeschaltet. Studienbewerberinnen und Studienbewerber, die sich in der Endphase ihres BA - Studiums befinden können eine vorläufige Zulassung mit folgenden Auflagen erhalten:

• Erbringen sämtlicher Prüfungsleistungen und Einreichen der Abschlussarbeit bis zum Beginn des Masterstudiums
• Nachreichen der BA-Urkunde (o.Ä.) innerhalb einer Frist von 3 Monaten
  

Nähere Informationen zum Bewerbungsverfahren finden Sie hier.

The department is delighted to welcome Junior-Professor Annemarie Verkerk, who has joined us from 1 April 2019 onwards. After obtaining her degrees from Radboud University Nijmegen, she worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, at the University of Reading and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. She is also starting a funded cooperation with colleagues at Yale university. In her research, she specializes in phylogenetic comparative methods applied to typologically-based research into language typology and related areas, covering both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. Her teaching applies cross-disciplinary methods to a broad range of topics in comparative grammar and semantics. Jun. Prof. Verkerk is currently still on parental leave and will soon start her activities in our department and faculty. The department is greatly looking forward to the new strengths which Jun. Prof. Verkerk will bring to research and teaching in language sciences at our university.

Eine interessante Stellungnahme von "Transforum - Koordinierungsausschuss Praxis und Lehre des Dolmetschens und Übersetzens" zur Darstellung der Zukunft des Übersetzer- und Dolmetscherberufs in den Medien finden Sie hier.