In 2003, after an intensive summer school in the beautiful surroundings of Rosendal in Norway, my fellow student Lars Nygaard and I were sitting in a café to chat about our future. Here the idea of an open collection of human translations for the benefit of everyone was born and we went home with the name in mind we made up for our resource: OPUS – the Open Parallel corpUS.

My recent research interests include discourse-oriented machine translation. One of the main shortcomings in current systems of automatic translation is the focus on local phenomena and the translations of sentences in isolation.

My memory is short but my time at the University of Helsinki has been even shorter so far, which does not make it easy to select a special moment I remember from being here. Nevertheless, I recall a special moment that involved at least one colleague from here.

The future is difficult to predict, as we all know.