Lieve Macken

Lieve Macken is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University. She started her career in 1993 at the Center for Computational Linguistics of the University of Leuven, developing a Simplified English Grammar Checker and Corrector (SECC), which was used as a front-end for machine translation systems helping to improve translation quality and reduce post-editing work by simplifying the input.

She worked at the R&D-department of Lernout & Hauspie Speech products and Scansoft for more than 8 years. She developed, first as language specialist, and later as a project and team leader text-to-speech systems for English.

From 2006 to 2009, she had the technical leadership of the Dutch Parallel Corpus project. In 2010 she defended her PhD "Sub-sentential alignment of translational correspondences", which formed the basis of the TExSIS bilingual terminology extraction system.

She (co-)supervised 6 successfully completed PhDs:

• Joke Daems (2012–2016) on the process and quality of manual translation and the post-editing of machine translations
• Arda Tezcan (2014-2018) on confidence estimation for machine translation
• Bram Vanroy (2017-2021) on predicting difficulty in translation
• Jasper Degraeuwe (2019-2024) on Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL)
• Margot Fonteyne (2021-2025) on translation tool-assisted second language writing
• Amaury Van Parys (2022-2026) on textbook reading materials and the coverage–comprehension relationship in the English and French foreign language classroom

She is currently co-supervising two PhD students:

• Ramona Meier (2025-2029) working on GenAI in L2 Writing Processes and Development
• Aurora Trapella (2024-2027, joint PhD with the University of Turin) focussing on machine-translated language features in newspapers articles from English into Italian

She mentored several visiting researchers:

• Randy Scansani (University of Bologna, 2018) working on Machine translation for institutional academic texts
• Delu Kong (Tongji University, 2024-2025) focussing on Post-editese and Machine-translationese.
• Ran Zhang (University of Mannheim, 2025) working on LLMs/Machine Translation and Literary Translation
• Lulu Wang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2026) working on Multi-Agent LLM Systems in Literary Translation

She was supervisor of the Horizon Europe Marie Sklodovska Curie Personal Fellowship of Paola Ruffo (2022-2024) and co-supervisor of the MaTIAS project (Machine Translation to Inform Asylum Seekers, AMIF, 2023-2025). She is involved in the CHIST-ERA project OSCAIL (Open science communication through AI in EU languages, 2026-2029)

She is coordinator of the CALM postgraduate programme, which focuses on technology for language professionals and lecturer-in-charge of several course units: Introduction to translation technology, Machine Translation and Post-editing and Natural Language Processing and Linguistic Analysis.