TRA2600

Séance 1

2 September 2026 · Introduction ; TAO : mémoires de traduction et installation de Wordfast

1. Went pretty well. The students were clearly impressed by the website, and the timing worked out.
2. Send a message through StudiUM beforehand telling people to bring their laptop to class.
3. The slides on the introduction were a bit too repetitive. I often found myself saying that we had pretty much already covered that.
4. The balance was right overall: take time with the introduction, add some theory, and talk about installing Wordfast.

Séance 2

9 September 2026 · Wordfast : premier projet et balises ; les formats d'échange

1. Slower than I had hoped. We did not get to the second exercise at all, so plan séance 2 on the first project and the exchange formats only.
2. Ending on a self-paced part worked well: the exchange-formats pages let everyone work at their own speed after two hours with the software open. Most of them will finish the reading at home, which is fine.
3. Warm feedback after class on the session being interesting and well built pedagogically. That part is working.
4. Technical skills in this group are lower than I assumed. One person had never opened a file manager and had no picture of folders and files at all; the others knew a little more but approached it with real apprehension. Plan the Wordfast sessions around that: the file and folder pages are not a formality here, and the whole bloc will run slower than the calendar suggests.

Séance 3

16 September 2026 · Wordfast : balises et traduction automatique, puis alignement

1. Open séance 3 with the tags project, since it did not start in séance 2. How much of alignment and quality assurance fits after it is an open question, decided on the day.
2. Went relatively well. The timing was right for the amount of content (tags and machine translation, then alignment).
3. Could be a little clearer still about the order: first the explanation, then the exercise.
4. On the essentials of markup languages, it is probably more important to talk about the general structure these languages share than about the details of each one.

Séance 4

23 September 2026 · Wordfast : assurance de la qualité et livraison, sur le projet d'un autre traducteur

1. Went pretty well. There was more than enough time, and that was a good thing: slower students could keep working longer, and there was room for questions about the exam, among other things.
2. Wordfast's Clean Up function was never covered: the chapters teach Save File As Translated as the one delivery route, and no page names Clean Up. Noticed while preparing the mid-session exam. Next year, show it on the delivery page beside Save File As Translated, with what it does to the memory, so students recognise the word when they see it in the menus or in another tool. on /todo/

Séance 5

7 October 2026 · TAL 1 : des règles aux grands modèles de langue ; segmentation et étiquetage morphosyntaxique

1. The timing was very good. Besides the two exercises (thinking along with the tokenization rules, and the part-of-speech one), it was a bit too much of just me talking. The part-of-speech practice was wrong: it reused the worked example's own word and corpus, so two answers were already on the theory page, and its first question asked for the probability in the order the method does not use. It was reworked the same day on a new word (montre / watch) and is to be corrected with the students.
2. Next year, think about integrating more practical parts: have students do all of the foundations reading at home, and spend the class on the NLP part. The timing worked this year, so the time the reading frees would go to more exercises.
3. I showed the video from Ethan Mollick's "The dot and the swarm" (https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-dot-and-the-swarm). I said I do not necessarily condone trivial uses of video generation, but it is a nice way to explain the concept, and it was already generated: showing it costs no more compute, where generating something similar would.

Séance 6

14 October 2026 · Examen de mi-session sur la TAO (en classe, sur ordinateur)

1. Mid-session Wordfast exam: most students took long, several very long, for the three hours.
2. The exam template was not clear enough on what to write in the journal about Transcheck, and some students lost a lot of time at the end trying to copy-paste the whole Transcheck report into it. The consignes say "chaque signalement corrigé ou justifié dans le journal", which reads as every flag going into the journal, while part 3 of the journal only asks for the flags left uncorrected. Next year: say in the consignes that a corrected flag needs nothing in the journal, say in part 3 not to paste the report, and allow one line per kind of flag (for instance "Spelling: Alignio, termbase, everywhere") rather than one per segment, since the noisy checks (Spelling, Untranslated Text, Edited Exact) produce dozens. on /todo/

TRA6008

Séance 1

3 September 2026 · Introduction, plan de cours, entrée en matière sur les GML ; annonce du Projet 1

1. Overall ok, but the platform does not land well with everyone: it can annoy as much as impress. What came up: a preference for a PDF of the plan de cours over searching through pages, and the different blocs of the course not reading as intuitive, with a separate one for the in-class content and for the parcours. Across both groups that was the exception rather than the rule.
2. Show the search function more explicitly next time. For anyone who finds the site hard to navigate, that may be all it takes, which is why this is a note rather than a change to the site.
3. I could have added more content while staying comfortably within the allotted time: we finished almost an hour early. Not too problematic, because I told them the extra time was for the assigned reading (three chapters), but next time at least one and maybe two more chapters could be covered in class.
4. Get a print-friendly view working, so that a student who wants the plan de cours on paper or as a PDF can have it. Not immediately, but in one of the next days or weeks. Built 3 September 2026: /print/<unit>/ assembles a module, a chapter or everything one séance assigns into one document, with filters for pages, figures, backgrounds and exercise solutions.

Séance 2

10 September 2026 · GML : théorie

1. The first part did not go well. Word embeddings still went reasonably, but contextual embeddings and attention and transformers were far too much: too technical, and not clear. I clearly lost them here. Both definitely need to be improved before I teach them again; not yet sure whether that means only the slides, a light mode, or the pages themselves. What went wrong, I think: the mix of still giving some technical detail without the technical baggage to carry it. The balance was not right. on /todo/
2. Tokenization went much better again, and LLMs as next-word predictors and training data were fine.
3. Eight chapters was too much for one séance: I only got as far as « Ce qui est filtré » in training data, and did not reach pretraining or fine-tuning and alignment. The rest became the reading for séance 3, two weeks later. I promised the students the adjusted reading before then, and that séance 3, the last theory session before the projects, would be about actually using LLMs (practical tips, but still theory) and about the dangers and downsides.
4. The request for printable material came back: text in a PDF of the site was reported as not selectable. I could not reproduce it (a PDF saved from Chrome keeps selectable text), so the cause is on the reading side, probably the app it was opened in.
5. A light version of the teach mode beside the full one: high-level, with far less terminology, while the pages keep the level of detail and accuracy they have now. Even the decks were pitched too high for this group in places. Even when a séance teaches only part of a chapter, the chapter is still written in full, so it is known to work as intended. on /todo/

Séance 3

24 September 2026 · Se servir des GML ; leurs limites et leurs risques ; rappel de la question du consentement (Projet 1)

1. The séance went well, but there was probably still a little too much content to cover: using LLMs (choosing a model, prompting, risks and safeguards), then GIGO, hallucinations, bias and environment, with the Projet 1 briefing already moved to séance 4. The pages carry a lot of text, so the class could not go through all of their nuance; the decks for this séance could be lighter, which is what the light teach mode noted at séance 2 would give. on /todo/
2. The group reading worked well: two groups, one reading bias (cultural defaults, correcting bias, who decides) and the other environment (putting it in proportion, data centres), about 20 minutes to prepare the three points the other group needs to know, what surprised them and where they disagreed or found the evidence weak, then a report to the whole class. It also gave me a break from teaching. Worth keeping for chapters where positions differ.
3. The group is ready to start the practical work from séance 4 on: the three theory séances were enough before the projects.
4. One student took the three remises of the parole parcours for the three projects and missed the 25 September 2026 deadline, although the date was in the plan de cours, on the site's calendar and dates table, on StudiUM's own assignment due dates, and presented in class; the other eight were on time. What helped after the fact: putting the self-paced blocs first on the class page, and saying at the end of a séance what is NOT to be read. What was really wrong on my side: the live site was three weeks behind the working tree, so the bloc page showed a reading due for the wrong séance. Push after any session that changes course dates. on /todo/

Séance 4

1 October 2026 · Projet 1 : présentation du travail de projet, questionnaire de profil, début de l'annotation, formation des équipes

1. Some trouble with the INCEpTION logins at the start of the annotation session; it was solved in class. Next year, have everyone log in once before the séance, or plan ten minutes for it.
2. The annotation took very different amounts of time: some had finished after about an hour, others were still working after an hour and a half. Having the assigned reading for séance 5 online already gave the early finishers something to start on.
3. A complaint about changing and unclear deadlines. Checked against the site's history: of thirteen graded deadlines, one moved since the first séance, the Projet 1 annotation, from 7 October 2026 to 4 October 2026, and that change went online the day before it was announced in class. It cost nobody anything: the annotation was done in class at séance 4, and everyone had finished before the old date (Ayla, 12 October 2026). The site was also three weeks stale in September, which looked like unclear dates from the students' side. I said in class that the Sunday date is soft: what counts is finishing the annotation before starting the reading. Next year: fix the annotation date before the term starts, and when a date does change, announce it once in writing on StudiUM the same day, with the old date and the new one. No separate reminders for every deadline.

Séance 5

8 October 2026 · Projet 1 : calcul de l'accord, précision, rappel et F1, retour sur la notion de terme et sur l'extraction automatique

1. The session ran long on questions about the reading, and the students were overwhelmed and confused by the Projet 1 information. I thought I had made it easy: everything was prepared, with good visualisations, but it was spread over too many pages (the brief, the agreement pages, the scoring page, the séance-5 follow-up, two templates), each partly repeating the others. Rebuilt the same afternoon as one step-by-step page, with the rest hanging off it.
2. Every project gets ONE practical page from the day it is launched: the steps in order, who does what, every deadline written out, what is graded and how, which page holds each result and what to choose on it, and the templates. Other pages explain or compute; they never carry a practical instruction the overview does not. Do it for Projet 2 before it is launched at séance 6, and for all three projects next year. on /todo/

The course as a whole

1. Two of nine students missed the formats quiz (due 11 October 2026) and a third did it a day late, after noticing on StudiUM the next morning. The quiz is an MS Forms link, not a StudiUM activity, so StudiUM had no due date to show and sent no reminder; the student who was late named the missing reminder, although the date was in the title of the StudiUM link itself, in the plan de cours, on the site's calendar and said in class. The published rule (20 % per day) was applied to all three. Next year: wrap each parcours questionnaire in a StudiUM assignment with the due date, or post the link as a dated activity, so the course page shows it as due the way the graded remises are. The parcours deadlines also all fall on Sundays between séances, with no class to anchor them. on /todo/ 12 October 2026
2. Grading the Word dictation part of the parole parcours (ten submissions) showed what the assignment page leaves open. (1) The reflection must be dictated, but nothing makes that checkable: two reflections showed no trace of dictation and said nothing about it. Ask for one sentence on how the dictation handled the reflection itself, so that the observation is gradable without guessing who typed. (2) Say which language the reflection is dictated in, or ask students to state it: three dictated in French and none mentioned switching the dictation language. (3) Ask students to list explicitly what they could not do by voice. Several gaps were simply left (INSERT tags, brackets, a numbered list as bullets) with no mention in the reflection, which is the one thing the page says not to do. (4) Ask them to try auto-punctuation on and off and to say what differed; the two who did produced the best observations. (5) Recurring problems worth a line in the demo page's tips box: "one" dictated as the digit 1, capitals appearing on redictated words, a punctuation command transcribed as text ("period", "full stop"), "select" failing on a misspelled word, a single letter that cannot be corrected (delete the word and redictate it). (6) Submission: three of ten files were off (a zip holding a PDF, first name before last name, a double .docx extension). Have StudiUM accept only .docx, and repeat the file name on the assignment page. (7) Scale used, settled after a first pass that gave eight of ten full marks: 2 points per part, and the reflection marked on four steps (every point with examples, a cause named, a link to the module; then without the link; then described only or one point empty; then two points empty), a quarter point at most for format and name, nothing for length. A late submission's 50 % ceiling is a cap applied per part (the earned mark or half the maximum, whichever is smaller), stated beside the earned mark in the feedback. (8) The 100 to 150 words asked for the reflection were too few: nine of ten ran over, up to about 240, and the longer ones were the useful ones. Raise the range. on /todo/ 7 October 2026
3. Grading the PowerPoint subtitling part of the parole parcours (ten submissions). The assignment worked: every student captured both tests with legible subtitles, and the reflections were precise. What the page should change: (1) raise the word range (150 to 200 was too few for five points with examples; most ran 180 to 320); (2) ask for numbered captures cited from the text, which one student did and which made her reflection checkable; (3) make the five points the required headings, since the only content deduction was a point skipped entirely (the translation quality); (4) say that a phone photo of the screen is acceptable when capture fails during the slideshow (one student); (5) repeat the file name, since the same students as in part 1 got it wrong (a zip of folders, a name without "parole2"). Observations worth a line on the demo page: numbers spelled out come back as digits, acronyms lose their capitals or become words (BERT → verte, BLEU → blue, API REST → happy rest), the live correction of subtitles hinders reading, and the subtitles vanish too fast for several students to judge the text-versus-image difference at all. on /todo/ 7 October 2026
4. Grading the HeyGen part of the parole parcours (nine submissions). All eight links resolved to public pages. What the page should change: (1) the provided video has no figures and few technical terms, so the questions about figures and terms are moot on it; adapt them or add a figure and two terms to the script; (2) "facteurs testés" as a separate point was the one most often skipped; fold it into the questions that test each factor; (3) recommend translating into a language the student knows well: the two who chose Arabic and Korean wrote the finest translation analyses, with something to say about register and terminology; (4) raise the word range (240 to 480 words written against 150 to 300); (5) keep the fallback that worked for a privacy objection, the reflection written from my own translated video, and state on the page by when such an objection has to be raised, since this one arrived at 19 h on the deadline day. (6) Nothing on the site or in the plan de cours says how the parole module's 6 % splits over its three parts; they were marked 2 / 2 / 2, as last year's 1.5 each. Say so in the table row of « Le parcours en ligne » (trois travaux de poids égal) and keep the three StudiUM maxima equal. on /todo/ 7 October 2026
5. The parole parcours as a whole, graded 7 October 2026, ten students. It did its job: everyone ran all three tools and wrote three reflections, and on the four-step scale the marks spread from 3 to 6 out of 6 with a clear middle, so the parcours tells students apart without being harsh. Lateness: two arrangements, both made by email and both applied exactly as written there, a 50 % ceiling for a student four days late on the whole remise (the published 20 % per day would have left her 20 %, not zero), and a 20 % penalty for one day on one part for a student who objected to HeyGen on privacy grounds and worked from my translated video. Next year, decide and write down before the term how a late remise of this parcours is handled, since the three parts and the privacy option make the 20 %-per-day rule awkward to apply. The same three students got the file name wrong on all three parts (a zip of folders with free names, first name first, a missing part number); the remark cost nothing after the first part, and repeating the convention on each assignment page is the fix. The weakest reflections were weak the same way on every part: symptoms listed, no cause, no link to the module; the strongest named a mechanism each time. Next year the three pages can say in one line what a good reflection does (explain, and connect to the module), which is what the scale rewards. 7 October 2026

Both courses

The course as a whole

1. Switching between chapters a lot during a class was a bit annoying, especially for the really short chapters. 3 September 2026
2. Avoid very short chapters where it can be helped, though the priority should of course always remain logical units. 3 September 2026
3. Combining all the practical information from both courses into a single chapter already seems like a good idea. To check first, before doing it mid-term: whether a simple merge would create odd structures. 3 September 2026
4. A teaching mode that covers all the material of an entire séance, rather than one deck per chapter, so that a class does not mean switching between chapters. Comes out of both first sessions. Built the same night: /class/<course>/<bloc>/teach/<n>/ assembles that séance's chapter decks in teaching order, and nothing is copied, so a deck edited once shows up in both views. 3 September 2026