In the last few years, increasing recourse to ever more efficient technologies and artificial intelligence has radically changed the interpreting and translating professions, triggering an evolution process whose outcomes are currently difficult to predict, but what is certain is that translators and interpreters have to do their best to respond to the changing requirements of a highly diversified market.
In these professions, as in many other sectors and professional activities, there has been a radical change in the procedures enacted and the technological options available - from translation memories to the extreme case of artificial intelligence (in the case of translation), from CAI tools to speech-to-text technologies (in the case of interpreting). I n language services, the nature of the final products to be supplied has also changed radically, with a wide diversification in the kind of transformation processes performed on the source text, involving differing levels of rewriting / reformulation. In addition, the interaction between different modes - written, oral, audiovisual media - requires the translator and the interpreter to manage a high degree of semiotic complexity and often also resemiotization.
Based on the assumption that the new professional contexts of translation and interpreting and the new ways of producing, transmitting and using knowledge require constant updates, the training of interpreters and translators cannot ignore these epoch-making changes, but must take them into account, opening up to new perspectives, new procedures and, consequently, to new teaching and training tools.
This very complex task cannot be improvised, but can only be based on the results of painstaking scientific research work that investigates the different aspects and directions of evolution in order to be able to provide students with up-to-date tools, making sure that such tools are not too soon overtaken by the rapid pace of ongoing evolution.
These are the themes we want to reflect on in the international conference "Training Translators and Interpreters Today: Perspectives and Evolutions", which will be held at IULM University, Milan, on 2 and 3 December 2024. The debate intends to take place in an interdisciplinary perspective, hoping to foster a productive exchange of ideas between scholars of translation and interpreting studies, audiovisual translation, linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching and information technology applied to translation and interpreting, in order to understand how the training of future practitioners can best be oriented.
The conference is organized by scholars participating in the project “Translation and interpretation in motion: contexts, methods, media and technologies. Translation and Interpreting on the Move: variation in contexts, modes, media and technologies”, approved by the Department of Humanities of IULM University, that follows on a sequence of projects approved by the Department of Humanities and carried out since 2019 in which this same research group has investigated the evolution and diversification of translation and interpreting activities in the contemporary world under the impetus of new media and new technologies.

We invite submissions, in Italian or English (presentation or poster), including (but by no means limited to) the following topics:

•Technologies for translator and interpreter training
•Use of NMT and AI in translators’ professional activity
•Training in the use of translation memories
•Training in the different types of post-editing
•Teaching remote interpreting (consecutive, simultaneous, dialogic)
•Using CAI tools in the teaching of simultaneous interpreting
•Terminology and terminological research from the viewpoint of translation and interpreting
•Terminological work and glossary compilation in interpreter training
•Training in collaborative translation and in the use of dedicated software
•Teaching audiovisual translation (dubbing and subtitling for cinema, TV channels and internet-based platforms - OTT)
•Training of specialists in the surtitling of theatrical works
•Training of experts in interlingual and intersemiotic translation for the hard of hearing/deaf, visually impaired/blind
•The role of Artificial Intelligence and VR in the teaching of translation and interpreting
•Teaching "other" forms of translation: pre-editing, localization and transcreation

We welcome submissions, in the form of abstracts of max 300 words plus five references, for:
- 20-minute presentations or
- posters (cm 70x100, portrait orientation),

to be sent by 15 September 2024 to the following email address: marta.muscariello@iulm.it

In your message, please indicate in the subject line “ABSTRACT TRAINING” and if your submission is for a presentation or a poster (e.g. “ABSTRACT TRAINING – presentation”).

Acceptance of submissions will be communicated by 10 October 2024.