The Translation Practicum at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) is a professional development course designed to provide students with hands-on experience in real-world translation environments. This practicum bridges the gap between academic training and industry practice by allowing students to apply their translation and editing skills to authentic projects. The practicum emphasizes client communication, adherence to deadlines, quality assurance, and use of industry-standard tools and fosters collaboration, attention to detail, and professionalism, preparing students for successful careers in the language services industry.

This course allows students to choose a translation project of at least 5000 words in their field of interest and it teaches students the foundations of AI in translation, such as:

Working with AI Translation Tools

• Hands-on with Google Translate, DeepL, ChatGPT

• Compare AI translations to human versions

• Common issues and how to spot them

Evaluating Translation Quality

• BLEU, METEOR, TER scores

• Human-centered evaluation methods

• Group project: rating and improving AI translations

Limitations and Challenges

• Language pairs with poor support

• Rare dialects, code-switching, idioms

• Longform and creative translation issues



Translation in Multimodal AI

• Speech-to-text, real-time voice translation

• Subtitles, dubbing, and accessibility

• Tools: Whisper, YouTube auto-captioning, Zoom’s live translation