The OTCT project will build on the results and recommendations of the OPTIMALE network, an Erasmus Academic Network of 70 academic and language industry partners in the field of professional translation. The OPTIMALE online survey of language industry employers’ competence requirements showed that awareness of and the ability to implement professional procedures throughout the translation process are key factors in the employability of university translation graduates. This led to the definition of good practice in specific areas of translator training, in particular in the integration of professionally-oriented practices in the curriculum.The OTCT project (Optimising Translator Training through Collaborative Technical Translation) aims to enhance the professionally-oriented content of university translation degree programmes via intensive collaborative technical translation sessions in simulated professional conditions (referred to as “Tradutech sessions”), and by exchanging good practice and resources on the implementation of project-based teaching and learning in the field of translator training.The project will involve students and staff in advanced translation degree programmes from seven academic institutions (Rennes 2 University, France; HE Vinci, Brussels, Belgium; Swansea University, UK; Univerzita Karlova V Praze, Prague, Czech Republic; Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Universita ta Malta, Malta; Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain). It will primarily involve 1st and/or 2nd year Master’s degree students (i.e. 20-80 students in each institution) but may also involve students in the final year of Bachelor’s degree programmes where relevant (i.e. Sevilla). Two to three members of the teaching staff from each institution will be directly involved, but a larger number will benefit from the outcomes of the project.The project will center on the “Tradutech” intensive sessions, with preparatory activities leading up to the sessions and material from the sessions feeding into further resources for use in the classroom. Four “Tradutech” sessions will take place during the project. Each five-day session will involve students setting up simulated translation companies (i.e. teams of 5-10 students, with specific responsibilities and roles assigned to each team member), who will then carry out large-scale multilingual technical translation projects according to the specifications and deadlines set by their “clients”. Source documents will be authentic technical manuals, reports or multimedia materials which will be translated into the main target language(s) of the partner institutions. The source documents will be in English or French as the case may be. Projects will be managed in turn by students from each partner institution, using collaborative software to exchange resource materials and files and computer-assisted translation software to carry out the translations. Prior to the Tradutech sessions, students will receive training in technical translation, project management, quality control and translation technologies, using resources produced by different partner institutions and shared with the other partners within the project. Participants will be briefed on the conditions and implementation of the Tradutech sessions, using tutorials produced by students from Rennes and Cluj with prior experience of such sessions. A joint terminology project will involve students from all the partner institutions, in order to promote cooperation and familiarize them with the use of the collaborative platform set up for the project. Output from the student “translation companies” will be assessed according to professional criteria by language industry professionals and feedback will be provided to the students and used as learning materials in classes following the Tradutech sessions. All students who have completed a Tradutech session (i.e. have successfully carried out the responsibilities and tasks allocated to them within one or several translation projects) and the preparatory work prior to the session, will be awarded 4 ECTS credits as part of their study programme.Two of Rennes Tradutech sessions will be attended by teaching staff from the other partner institutions, who will take part in a parallel training of trainer session. Two other sessions will be attended by students from the other institutions, who will be integrated as full members of the Rennes teams.Sustainability will be ensured by teaching and learning resource production and dissemination, the training of trainer sessions, and the production of a Handbook on the implementation of project-based translator training which will be made freely available to other institutions. Participating students will benefit from the hands-on experience and professional feedback, while teaching staff will gain experience of project-based collaborative learning methodologies.

Azole resistance in Aspergillus is one of the emerging public health concerns, listed as a WHO priority and suited to an integrated One Health approach. Selective pressure due to the use of azole pesticides in agriculture being incriminated, identification of clinical and environmental resistance patterns, and a greater understanding of the factors driving this resistance are urgently needed in order to issue recommendations to the stakeholders. The multidisciplinary AspergillusOne-health project strengthened with model and innovative methodologies (WGS, genotyping, MALDI typing, metabarcoding, AI) aims to identify hotspots as possible sources for selection of azole-resistance in the environment, after the detection of azole-resistant Aspergillus in patients and patiens's home, avian facilities, the environment (farming and sawmills), and detection of the azole fungicides in soil and air. The role of resistance trait on Aspergillus fitness cost will be investigated, using environmental strains and mutants selected after fungicide pressure, to assess its clinical involvement.

The GEOPRAS consortium comprises seven partners that have been involved for several years in coastal archaeology. Our programme studies the coastal societies of recent Prehistory (Mesolithic and Neolithic) on the French Atlantic shores in order to understand their social and economic organization and the role they play in broader historical dynamics such as neolithization. Characteristics such as the accumulation of goods through storage, specialised modes of production, and the emergence of a social hierarchy or a sedentary lifestyle are often attributed to these coastal populations, on the basis of ethnographic documents from the last two centuries. However, each of these social manifestations must be described according to regional environmental variables, without evolutionary preconceptions. Our research hypothesis is that environmental dynamics have greatly facilitated certain forms of historical evolution. This encourages us to determine with greater precision the nature of these environmental transformations, then to analyse human networks at the continent-ocean interface. The first task will be to restore the environmental benchmarks. During the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, most coastal landscapes were radically transformed by the sea-level rise and the associated processes of erosion and sedimentation. The coastal environments of the past will be reproduced through a three-level approach combining a large scale (region) with an intermediate scale (nearby landscape) and a local scale (archaeological site). Our consortium proposes a combination of methods suited to different geographical conditions (dunes, rocky coasts, marshlands) around the Bay of Biscay, testing the limits of several of them. To gain the best possible understanding of an "archaeological signal", the GEOPRAS project will focus on developing rapid intervention and rescue methods for archaeology and geoarchaeology. We intend to apply these methods to sites currently being excavated or whose exploration is planned as part of the project, such as foreshore and marshland sites and shell middens. Optimal integrated methods and procedures will be developed for the recording of archaeological remains, which are often ephemeral on foreshores, as well as for sampling, particularly in shell middens. These procedures include geophysical surveys, archaeozoology, micromorphology, geochemistry, taphonomy, metagenomic approaches, and OSL datings. The second task is to study how human societies have managed the land-sea interface. Shell middens have become the emblematic nodes of these coastal Holocene settlements because they contain an abundance of bio-archaeological data. They will be analysed to judge biodiversity as well as food practices. The third task is to understand the specific features of technical systems in a maritime context, especially seafaring. This technical field is at the heart of all the questions raised about the relationships between coastal areas, as well as the decisive features of the various technical systems developed in these areas. To overcome the lack of knowledge of prehistoric watercraft, we suggest an approach, based on three disciplinary poles in permanent interaction: 1) ethnographic and historical references, 2) technological and use-wear analyses of lithic and bone tools, 3) experimentation. In addition to proposing methodological developments, we aim to lay down the conceptual, methodological and technical foundations of a maritime prehistory with procedures adapted to coastal heritage. The results will be included in a handbook of maritime prehistory, to be published in French and English. The involvement of amateur archaeologists, observers, tourists and other citizens in scientific tasks will be anticipated and coordinated by inviting them to take part in the main scientific meetings and, of course, in field operations such as surveys, excavations and experiments.

The KidamySyn project is built on the collaboration of three teams (Nantes, Rennes, Le Mans) and plans to achieve the first total synthesis of Kidamycin, a member of the Pluramycins family. This project submitted in 2013 has been selected on the additional list and received very good appreciations from the evaluation committee. This situation convinced the constituted consortium to resubmit the proposal in a revised form with a better distribution of tasks between the different partners and additional informations about the few remarks emphasised by the referees. The pluramycins display a 4H-anthra[1,2-b]pyran-4,7,12-trione structure with attached C-glycoside moieties (D-angolosamine and L-vancosamine) and a remote epoxide or unsaturated lateral chain. Their core structure with four contiguous rings, one of which being angularly disposed, is clearly reminiscent of the angucycline class of natural compounds. Besides their remarkable structure, many members of the pluramycin family have promising biological activities, making it a particularly attractive target for organic chemists. Following our common experience in the chemistry of angucyclines and in the development of innovative synthetic methodologies, our project aims to design and to realise the total synthesis of kidamycin following a convergent strategy that should be efficiently transposed in a second phase to the synthesis of analogues and pluramycin-related molecules with potential enhanced activities. We will first focus our attention on the synthesis of kidamycin aglycone named kidamycinone. The pluramycinone skeleton will be elaborated in a highly convergent manner via B-ring construction by Diels-Alder cycloadditions involving novel dienes already possessing the lateral chains and juglone. This first task, based in part on the results already obtained in our laboratory, should enable to strengthen the viability of our synthetic plan towards the kidamycin. The main goal of the project, the synthesis of kidamycin itself, will start by the preparation of the dienophile partner with its two C-glycoside appendages and its subsequent reaction with appropriate diene. Recent literature reports mention the difficulties encountered in installing the two unit sugars by direct C-glycosidation with the appropriate stereoconfiguration mainly for the L-vancosamine link. We therefore designed a new stereocontrolled approach based on a direct C-glycosidation with D-angolosamine followed by the critical introduction of L-vancosamine unit by univocal transformation of the corresponding glycal. Finally, the Diels-Alder strategy developed for kidamycinone will be applied to couple the two key fragments to afford kidamycin after a limited number of further functional transformations. This convergent route, associated with the potential structural diversity of the dienyl building blocks, would enable access to other pluramycin-related compounds and related simplified derivatives. Encouraging preliminary results indicate that the challenging objectives of this project, the total synthesis of kidamycin and the development of innovating synthetic strategies, should be reasonably achieved under the proposed schedule.

Ultrafast light excitation is expected to trigger new states in solids, which are not accessible by varying the pressure, temperature, or doping in standard thermodynamic equilibrium conditions. Ultrafast terahertz (THz) spectroscopy has been blooming for the last 20 years. Developments of new intense THz sources provide the tools to trig not only the linear response but also the nonlinear response of matter offering new perspectives in exploring extreme matter behavior at the picoseconds timescale. In solid state physics, different degrees of freedom have been addressed dynamically by driving electrons, phonons or spins well out-of-equilibrium with ultrashort THz pulses. The EPHONO project is focus on fundamental aspects of the light induced ultrafast lattice dynamics in condensed matter. It aims at unraveling the complexity of coherent phonon-phonon interactions with high THz field at the sub-picoseconds timescales. In the EPHONO project, I will apply the nonlinear phononics framework in order to explore the optical phonons ultrafast dynamics into the nonlinear regime. As optical phonons are mediating matter properties (the “soft mode” in phase transition material, the ferroelectric mode in multiferroics material to name a few), it is crucial to develop experimental and theoretical methods to study, explain and predict the excitation pathways in this extreme nonlinear regime. To achieve this, I propose to tackle this problem in two connected ways by experimental and theoretical investigations. The first one will be dedicated to the development of state-of-art nonlinear ultrafast THz spectroscopy and the second one to ab-initio calculations within the Density Functional Theory. Within this context, the EPHONO project will be at the core of developments both experimentally (2D THz spectroscopy) and theoretically (ab-initio calculations). The main idea of the experimental approach is based on the fact that “regular” ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy in the THz range is not enough to fully understand the ultrafast lattice dynamics: single-pulse excitation does not fully unravel the complexity of phonon-phonon interaction. That is why, extending the experimental technique to multidimensional ultrafast THz spectroscopy associated to a THz frequency tunability, will allow distinguishing the dominant optical phonon mode excitation pathway. More precisely, this technique is based on using a multiple pump pulses sequence, which allows decoupling the excitation frequency to the detected frequency by looking at their correlation in the frequency domain. This powerful method can help to unravel the different coupling pathways leading to the excitation of one specific optical phonon mode. It can be implemented in two ways: either by measuring the optical properties change with a delayed optical probe (2D THz-Raman) or by measuring the total transmitted THz electric field by an electro-optic sampling technique (2D THz Spectroscopy). The experimental aspects of the project EPHONO will be supported by “in-house” theoretical approach with ab-initio calculations (Density Functional Theory) within the framework of the local density approximation with Spin-orbit coupling included. The purpose of these calculations is to understand the obtained experimental results in the case of a Bi2Te3 nanofilm excited with a strong THz pulse. The aim is to be able to have a quantitative comparison between experimental and high end first principles calculations. The strategy will be focused on continuing investigating topological insulator like nanofilm of Bi2Te3. This type of material possesses strong anharmonicities and, thus, makes them ideal for studying nonlinear phononics. In a second step of this project, other materials will be studied such as multiferroic and ferroelectric materials in which another degree of complexity exists. Applying the multidimensional spectroscopy will provide new insights in this multi-orders material.