Caritas Institute of Higher Education is pleased to announce that it has awarded the inaugural international Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities, in the area of Translation Technology (2022), to Professor Feng Zhiwei, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Ministry of Education, China, for his outstanding achievements in translation technology; and the Certificate of Commendation to Professor Benjamin Tsou Ka Yin, Emeritus Professor of City University of Hong Kong, and Professor Gloria Corpas Pastor, Professor at the University of Malaga (Spain) respectively for their significant contributions to the field of translation technology.
The institution of the biennial Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities by the School of Humanities and Languages in September 2021 is closely related to the Institute's aspiration to strive for academic excellence in teaching and research. In teaching, the School established the world-first Bachelor of Arts in Translation Technology programme in September 2020 to train a new generation of translation graduates who meet the needs of society in the digital age. In research, the School established the Techno-Humanities Research Centre, the second in the world, in January 2021 with Research Grants Council funding to serve as a platform for colleagues of the Institute and local and international scholars to conduct intercollegiate, interdisciplinary, and inter-regional collaborative cutting-edge research into technology and the humanities. To promote techno-humanities on a global context, the Institute established the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities in September 2021, which is to be awarded to an individual or institution in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the development of technologies in the humanities for the well-being of humankind. The prize carries a monetary award of US$15,000, a certificate, and a trophy. The inaugural domain for the Prize in 2022 is Translation Technology.
Nomination was opened internationally on 1 October 2021. The work of selecting a recipient for the Prize started immediately after the close of the nomination period on 1 December 2021. After a vigorous process of selection, it was decided by the Prize Committee that the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities goes to Professor Feng Zhiwei, and the Certificate of Commendation is awarded to Professor Benjamin Tsou Ka Yin and Professor Gloria Corpas Pastor respectively.
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Professor Feng Zhiwei
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Professor Benjamin Tsou Ka Yin
Recipient of the Certificate of Commendation |
Professor Gloria Corpas PastorRecipient of the Certificate of Commendation |
Professor Feng Zhiwei received his BA in Chinese Language in 1964 and MA in Chinese Linguistics in 1967 from Peking University, and his MSc in Natural Science in 1979 from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Professor Feng has been a pioneer and has worked for fifty years in the field of translation technology, winning awards in different countries, including the Wüster Special Prize by INFOTERM and Austrian Commission for UNESCO in June 2006 for his achievements in terminology, and the NLPCC (Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing) Distinguished Achievement Award of the CCF (China Computer Federation) in 2018 for his contribution to natural language processing.
Professor Feng has been a leading scholar in natural language processing and terminologist in China, being the first scholar to encode Chinese characters by the two-byte means, the first scholar to apply dependency grammar and valence grammar to machine translation, the first scholar to study the axiomatic approach of generative grammar in China, the first person to develop a multilingual machine translation system for Chinese to French, English, Japanese, Russian and German translation, and the first scholar in China to offer a course and publish a book on mathematical linguistics.
A prolific scholar with many publications over a span of sixty years from 1961 to 2021, Professor Feng has published 38 academic books and 483 academic articles on topics relating to translation technology.
The Prize Committee of the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities has awarded the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities in the area of Translation Technology (2022) to Professor Feng in recognition of his outstanding achievements in translation technology.
Professor Benjamin Tsou Ka Yin received his BSc in Mathematics and Physics from Brandeis University, MA from Harvard University and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in linguistics. After his retirement, he founded Chilin (HK) Limited and developed a cloud-based "PatentLex Translation Assistant" (PaTTA), a post-editing system for professional translators. The PaTTA prototype won the second place in the 2019 Game Changer Innovation Contest organized in Singapore by TAUS.
The Prize Committee of the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities has awarded a Certificate of Commendation to Professor Tsou in recognition of his significant contributions to translation technology.
Professor Gloria Corpas Paster received her BA and MA in Anglo-German Studies (English major) from the University of Malaga, and PhD in English Philology and University Complutense of Madrid.
Professor Corpas Pastor is Professor in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Malaga, Spain. She has to date published 4 books, 12 edited books, 78 book chapters, 49 journal articles, 10 edited proceedings, and 64 contributions to conference proceedings. In the last 20 years, she has been the project leader of 11 national and regional R&D projects, 4 European R&D projects, and 1 R&D project funded by a foreign University.
She has been awarded several research awards, including the 2007 "Translation Technologies Award" given by the Spanish Research Network on Translation Technologies, and the 2017 "Farola Award" in the field of New Technologies, given by the Andalusian Women's Institute, Junta de Andalucía. Her seminal contributions to the areas of corpus-based translation, computational phraseology, and technology for translation and interpretation have inspired generations of researchers both in Spain and abroad.
The Prize Committee of the Saint Francis Prize in Techno-Humanities has awarded a Certificate of Commendation to Professor Corpas Pastor in recognition of her significant achievements in translation technology.
The prize presentation ceremony will be held at the campus of Caritas Institute of Higher Education on 5 January 2022.
The Prize is managed by the Prize Committee and the Selection Committee. Members of the Prize Committee are Dr Kim Mak Kin-wah (chairperson), Professor Rosie Young Tse Tse, Professor Annie Bligh, Dr Dennis Law, Mr Manhoe Chan, Dr Kat Leung, and Professor Chan Sin-wai. Members of the Selection Committee are Professor Chan Sin-wai (chairperson), Professor Lynne Bowker of the University of Ottawa in Canada, Professor Alan K. Melby of Brigham Young University in the United States, and Professor Mark Shuttleworth of Hong Kong Baptist University.