Claudia Wiesinger is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Vienna.  Her area of research is Translation Studies, with a particular focus on Crisis Translation. Claudia is one of the many participants in the REVALORISE+ programme, and contributed the Research Asset “Facilitating multilingual crisis communication: The applications of speech-enabled machine translation post-editing (PEMT) in crisis translation” which you can download here. We invited Claudia to reflect on her participation in the project.

“When I saw the announcement for the REVALORISE+ programme, it felt like serendipity. Just a few days prior, I had been racking my brain trying to think of ways to create a real-world impact from my research. While I had some vague ideas, I was in desperate need of guidance on how to develop them further. Enter REVALORISE+.

For three months, we had several online workshops and networking opportunities, which helped shape my Personal Valorisation Project (PVP). First and foremost, I wanted to engage external research partners, as well as educational and governmental partners. However, with the thematic focus of my research being crisis translation, I was also keen on finding creative ways of training and educating disaster relief responders and the general public in translation and the most efficient use of language technologies. For this reason, I particularly enjoyed the session on communication and storytelling, which gave me the idea of creating a series of animated videos for social media in addition to an online platform for research, resources, and training materials.

While the online sessions were helpful, the PVP workshops at the University of Vienna were the highlight of the entire programme. These two in-person workshops gave us the chance to present our PVPs in front of our peers and get feedback from people who were listening to our ideas for the first time. This helped clarify my ideas and even gave me some new ones.

It has almost been a year since the end of the programme, and I am happy to report that I am working towards turning my PVP into a reality, bringing me one step closer to creating research impact beyond the page.”