NPIT5 at Amsterdam



The call for papers has been out for some time for the Fifth International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation. It's the most important international conference for the Followers of this blog. It will take place at the University of Amsterdam Department of Communication Science, 24-26 June 2020. The deadline for submissions is 15 October, 2019. The official website is at https://www.npit5.com/.

It inspires confidence to see that Rachele Antonini of Bologna-Forli is on the Advisory Board, because it was she who launched the epoch-making first NPIT conference back in 2012, That we are now at the fifth conference in the series means NPIT studies are almost mainstream at last.

The following list of suggested topics gives some idea of the scope of NPIT:

Adult/child language and cultural brokering

Community translation and interpreting
Family interpreting
Natural/native translation/interpreting
Non-professional church/religious interpreting and/or translation
Non-professional media interpreting and/or translation (fansubbing, fandubbing, fanfiction, news, talk-shows, the web, etc.)
Non-professional sign language interpreting
Stakeholder perspectives on non-professional interpreters and translators
Training of non-professional interpreters and translators
Non-professional interpreting and/or translation in the field of war/conflicts, NGOs, asylum seeking, health care, community and social care, legal and police.

The conference announcement rightly sums it all up this way:

Pushing definitional and theoretical boundaries of interpreting and translation, it is a dynamic and still under-researched field that does not necessarily conforms to norms guiding professional multilingual communicative practices, though in many settings and contexts non-professional interpreting and translation is, in fact, more common in bridging diverse cultural and linguistic worlds, than professional interpreting and translation.

Reference
Rachele Antonini et al. (eds.) Non-professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the art and future of an emerging field of research.
(Benjamins Translation Library 129). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2017. 425p..