Job description
Department: LW22 – Department of Translation, Interpretation and Communication
Type of contract: Fixed duration
Diploma: Master’s degree in a field relevant to the research (for example Translation, Linguistics and Literature, (Comparative) Literature, or Cultural Studies)
Occupancy rate: 100%
Vacancy type: Research staff
This vacancy concerns a full-time, four year doctoral position in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication (supervisors: Prof. Lieve Macken and prof. Arda Tezcan), at Ghent University.
About the research
Automatic evaluation metrics play a central role in contemporary translation workflows, where they assess the quality of machine translations quickly and in a scalable manner. However, their reliability within specific domains and language pairs has not been sufficiently investigated, nor has the extent to which their assessments correspond to the judgement of language professionals and end users.
This project examines the reliability of automatic evaluation metrics by systematically comparing their assessments with two complementary reference frameworks: professional reviews (as is common in the translation industry) and user-oriented measurements that map the impact on the reader.
The metrics examined included traditional word and character-based approaches (BLEU, ChrF, TER), neural metrics (COMET, CometKiWi) and more recent LLM-based evaluation methods (e.g. LLM-as-a-judge). These are compared with professional evaluation frameworks (MQM, SQM) and objective user-oriented measurements such as reading times and comprehension scores.
The research focuses on at least two language pairs, with English-Dutch as a fixed starting point. Depending on the candidate's profile and expertise, a third language may be added (such as French, Spanish or any other language).
Submit your application by 10 July 2026 (23:59).