The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2017 - 26

OUR WORLD OF WORDS: SPOTLIGHT ON T&I PROFESSIONALS

BY TONY BECKWITH

Interview with Thierry Fontenelle, Head of the
Translation Department of the Translation Centre
for the Bodies of the European Union

P

roject managers at U.S. translation
agencies are very familiar with the
challenges involved in organizing
and coordinating large projects across
a range of languages. My guest for this
column faces those same challenges as
they apply to the European Union, which
consists of 28 member states with 24
official languages. His department handles
translation projects for over 60 clients in
more than 550 language combinations.
Thierry Fontenelle is the head of the
Translation Department at the Translation
Centre for the Bodies of the European
Union. He has a PhD in linguistics
from the University of Liège, Belgium
(1995). He is the author of many
publications on lexicography, natural
language processing, computational
linguistics (in particular, computational
lexicography), proofing tools, and
translation and terminology, including
Practical Lexicography: A Reader (Oxford
University Press, 2008). His PhD thesis,
"Turning a Bilingual Dictionary into
a Lexical-Semantic Database," was
published in the Lexicographica Series
Maior (Niemeyer, 1997). He is an
associate editor of the International Journal
of Lexicography (Oxford University Press)
and a past president of Euralex, the
European Association for Lexicography.
A native of Belgium, Thierry worked
as a research and teaching assistant at the
University of Liège (1986-1996), then
at the European Commission Translation
Service as a computational linguist.
He also worked as a translator and an
interpreter for NATO before moving to the
U.S., where he worked as a developer and
subsequently as a senior program manager
for Microsoft (2001-2009) creating
proofing tools (spell-checkers, grammar
checkers, and linguistic technology for
Microsoft Office). He returned to Europe
in 2009 to work for the Translation Centre
for the Bodies of the European Union in
Luxembourg, where he currently manages
a team of around 110 translators.
26

The ATA Chronicle | November/December 2017

You were a translator and interpreter for
NATO some years ago. Where were you
stationed? Did you work as a computational
linguist there, or were you engaged in the
more traditional form of translation?
Between 1999 and 2001, I worked in
Luxembourg for the NATO Maintenance
and Supply Agency, as it was called at
that time. (Today it's known as the NATO
Support and Procurement Agency). I
worked as a translator from and into
English and French (NATO's two official
languages) for about 75% of the time. I
was an interpreter in the same language
pair for the remaining 25%. That's where
I learned to work in a booth doing
simultaneous interpreting.

Thank you, Thierry, for spending time with
us today. Your linguistic background speaks
for itself. What languages do you speak and
how/where did you learn them?
My mother tongue is French. I speak
English, which I started learning when I
was 12, and Dutch, which I started learning
when I was 13. I also speak some German.

What originally got you interested in
languages and then in the computational
aspect of linguistics?
I graduated from the University of Liège
in 1986 with a BA in English and Dutch
language and literature. I also have an
MA in English translation and a PhD
in English linguistics. Initially, I was
involved in research projects related
to machine-readable dictionaries and
machine translation in the 1980s. I was
intrigued by the similarities between
teaching language to non-native speakers
and "teaching" a computer to understand
language (e.g., for machine translation or
grammar checking).

Let's talk about your current job. First, who
are your clients? What types of documents
are involved? The Translation Centre's
website mentions trademark translations.
What exactly does that entail? What else
does your team translate?
The Translation Centre's mission is
to provide linguistic services (mainly
translations) to decentralized EU agencies,
as well as to European institutions that
use our services on an ad hoc basis. As
an EU agency, we can only work for
EU agencies and institutions, which
are located all over Europe. We cover
many subject fields, including drugs and
medicine, maritime security, chemicals,
education, railways, food safety, and
intellectual property. Our biggest client is
the European Union Intellectual Property
Office (EUIPO) in Alicante, Spain. The
EUIPO deals with the registration of EU
trademarks and designs, and we translate
the descriptions of goods and services
associated with a given trademark into all
official languages of the EU. For the other
agencies, the documents we translate
include activity reports, guidelines (e.g.,
in the financial supervision field), work
programs, websites, leaflets, brochures,
and press releases.
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