Next Non-professional Intepreting & Translation Conference

Post No. 386

Things are moving! The call for papers has appeared for the Fourth International Conference on Non-professional Interpreting and Translation. For its web site click [here] or go to http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/NPIT4/voawr/about/index. You can register from there to receive further announcements.

The dates are 22-24 May, 2018. The venue is Stellenbosch, near Cape Town.  The city is in the heart of the South African wine country. The deadline for submitting abstracts of papers is 28 May 2017. The organizer is the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study of Stellenbosch University (a bilingual English and Afrikaans institution), and from the tenor of the first announcement it looks as if the conference will be well organized. The person in charge is Prof. Harold Lesch. I'm glad to see that Rachele Antonini, the instigator of the first NPIT back in 2012, is on the advisory committee.

Cape Town is a long and rather expensive journey away for those of us in the northern hemisphere (a minimum of about 16 hours and 700 euros), but the choice of venue this time is a sign that NPIT is being recognized as a worldwide phenomenon in practice and in research. Something like what happened to the Critical Link series for community interpreters when it moved from Canada to Australia. Meeting in Africa will open up a whole new area of intense translation activity in many less familiar languages, so the conference should be fascinating.

The list of suggested topics is long and there's the usual "Topics may include, but are not limited to." However, one that I see as missing is the role of machine translation in NPIT. Whatever its imperfections (a euphemism) it can no longer be laughed off.

It's to be hoped that there won't be a repetition of the rather acrimonious divide of views that ended NPIT3. Echoes of it reached me in Spain. NPIT will always exist, fuelled by Natural and Native Translation and maintained by the impossibility of finding Professional Expert Translators for all the translation that's needed or of paying for them. It has its uses and its validity.