Convenors: Monika Krein-Kühle (TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences in Cologne), Ralph Krüger (TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences in Cologne) and Min-Hsiu Liao (Heriot-Watt University)

Museums are important cultural institutions in modern society, selecting, preserving, and recreating memories. They act as interfaces where the past meets the present and facilitate contemporary reflections on the evolution of humanity. As an emerging field within translation studies, museum translation, including art and heritage translation, examines how translation participates in the museumisation process, which involves decontextualising objects from their historical origins, recontextualising them within the museum space, and exhibiting them to visitors. This process involves constructing meaning through an assemblage of diverse semiotic resources and engaging visitors in multisensory ways: reading, seeing, touching, feeling, and moving about.

Museums do not only translate the past into the present, but mediate across multiple dimensions: spatially, relocating objects from where they were once produced and used to their exhibition sites; culturally, creating a “contact zone” where objects and visitors from different contexts and often with conflicting perspectives meet; and multimodally, recreating past events into visual or virtual displays, and narrating visual displays through written labels, audio descriptions, or sign language interpretation. The interplay between “museum as translation” (viewing curatorial practices as cultural translation) and “translation in museums” (interlingual translations of verbal interpretations) is crucial to these mediation processes. This panel aims to encourage a multi-/transdisciplinary approach in order to engage with the complexities of museum translation, examining its implications for cultural sustainability, historical interpretation, and the ethical transmission of knowledge across time and space.

List of subtopics

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Translationand the Politics of Cultural Representation: Explore the power dynamics at play in the translation of cultural narratives within museums, particularly how different perspectives are mediated and represented, sustaining or challenging historical legacies. 
• TheTranslation of Trauma and Memory: Discuss how museums translate experiences of trauma, particularly in memorial museums, and the ethical considerations involved in making historical suffering resonate with today's visitors.  
• DecolonialApproaches to Museum Translation: Examine how translation in postcolonial or decolonialmuseum contexts can serve to redress historical imbalances and empower marginalised voices. 
• Multimodal/Intersemiotic Translation and Sensory Engagement: Investigate how semiotic resources including written or spoken texts, visual displays, and spatial design co-construct meaning within museum spaces. 
• Accessibleand Inclusive Translation: Explore strategies for enhancing inclusivity in museums through translation practices that address the diverse linguistic, cultural, and sensory needs of all visitors. This also includes developing materials that accommodate neurodivergent individuals, providing sign language interpretation, and ensuring compatibility with hearing aids.  
• ArtTranslation and Re(Creation): Explore the potential, conditions and constraints of the artist’s visual perception and sensuous cognition as expressed in the artwork as a prerequisite for visual description and its translation/(re)creation in the fine arts context by drawing on, e.g., aesthetics, writings of visual artists, art history, philosophy of art, phenomenology, hermeneutics and reception/audience response theory. 
• Art Translation andArtificial Intelligence: Explore the potential of current language-oriented AItechnologies (particularly neural machine translation and large language models) in assisting in the translation of the visual description of works of art. This can include both ‘traditional’ unimodal NMT systems such as DeepL or Google Translate as well as new multimodal LLMs such as GPT-4o, whose capacity to attend to both textual and visual modalities offer the – still under-researched – potential to assist in multimodal translation scenarios. This also allows exploring the division of labour between humans and machines in creative translation modessuch as museum or art translation. 
• DigitalTranslation in Virtual Museum Spaces: Consider the role of translation in the virtual museum landscape, where knowledge is generated and recreated through digital platforms,sustaining cultural memory in new, accessible forms.

For informal enquiries: monika.krein-kuehle@th-koeln.de

Bionote of panel convenors:

Monika Krein-Kühle, PhD, MA, Diplom-Übersetzerin, is Professor Emerita of English Linguistics and Translation Studies at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany, where she founded and directed the MA course in specialized translation which is part of the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) network. She has extensive working experience as a translator, translator trainer and as head of the translation departments of major German companies. She is actively involved in research into fine-art and museum translation, scientific and technical translation, literary translation, translator training, methodology in translational research and corpus-based translation studies, and she has published in all these fields. She is a member of IATIS.

Ralph Krüger is Professor of Language and Translation Technology at the Institute of Translation and Multilingual Communication at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany. He received his PhD in translation studies from the University of Salford, UK, in 2014 and completed his habilitation at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in 2024. His current research focuses on analysing the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs) in the specialised translation process and on developing and operationalising an artificial intelligence literacy framework for translation, interpreting and specialised communication.

Min-Hsiu Liao is Associate Professor at The Centre for Translation & Interpreting Studies in Scotland (CTISS), Heriot-Watt University. Her research focuses on multimodal translation within museums, heritage sites and urban landscapes, emphasizing the interaction between verbal and visual semiotics, as well as the dynamics between text producers and receivers.

Convenors: Joseph Lambert (Cardiff University), Mónica Rodríguez-Castro (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) and Minna Ruokonen (University of Eastern Finland)

The global language services industry has shown consistent growth in recent years and some industry projections continue to depict a relatively healthy picture, forecasting growth from $74.1bn in 2024 to $97.2bn by 2028 (Nimdzi 2024). However, recent data has tempered this optimism, showing an overall decline in the size of the sector, particularly in the ‘human translation’ market (CSA 2024, 19).

Increasing concerns have begun to surround the sustainability of the industry in recent years, also making themselves felt in the translation classroom (Hu forthcoming; Pym 2024). While these concerns stem from multiple factors, on-going technological disruption, notably in generative AI and MT, and the resultant creep of automation, continue to fuel change across the language industry, reforming workflows and inducing polarising narratives (Fırat et al. 2024; Giustini 2024; Peng 2024). Concerns over overall job satisfaction, specifically working conditions, pay, and public recognition, and a complex professional conjuncture more generally have compounded human capital satisfaction and retention issues (Lambert and Walker 2024; Rodríguez-Castro 2024; Ruokonen and Svahn 2024). Globally, the technological disruption may contribute to an increasingly uneven distribution of rewarding and fairly compensated work among translators working in different roles, settings and geographical locations (e.g., Fırat forthcoming), leading to an exacerbated ‘feast or famine’ cycle.

Amidst this uncertain climate, there is also a growing consideration of the importance of human factors, with wellbeing concerns “now considered an essential part of a sustainable life and career” (Hubscher-Davidson and Panichelli-Batalla forthcoming). Both initiatives contributing to translators’ psychological resilience (see, e.g., Hubscher-Davidson 2024) and structural measures may well become crucial for the sustainability of the industry.

Additionally, while diversification and holding a second job outside the language industry may serve some professionals well, limited research has interrogated its longer-term impact on career and professional sustainability.

Ultimately, this concerning, and fast-changing, wider context has led some to question the long-term existence of the language industry and our place in the ecosystem more generally (e.g., Moorkens et al. 2024). This panel seeks to explore these complex, interrelated issues from an array of international perspectives. We invite papers related to the following topics:

• To what extent are increased technologisation and automatisation compatible with the ecological and/or economic sustainability of the language industry, the sustainability of the language professions, and professional wellbeing?
• How do the changes in the language industry affect professionals in different positions(from platform workers tofreelancers and in-house employees), in different locations (the global south vs the global north) and working with different language resources (from minoritised to heavily resourced languages)? How do professionals experience these changes?
• Which issues and challenges have been hindering sustainability in job satisfaction and might have contributed to higher turnover? Which sustainable elements of job satisfactiondifferentiate certain positions, different locations orunique work settings?
• Howcan industry stakeholders and researchers best support language professionals’ resilience? To what extent do professional competences and soft skills need to be revisited or reimagined to ensure professional, ecological and economical sustainability and employability?
• What new career pathways may need to be devised in order to ensure sustainable employabilityamidst the volatilityof the language industry? What new opportunities and roles are opening up for translation and interpreting professionals beyond the language industry?
• How is language professionals’ training/education being reshaped? Is it feasible to train tech-savvy graduates for the needs of the industry while ensuring their broader employabilityand ability for critical reflection and ethical action? Orshould we opt for a broader academic curriculum and what form would that take?

For informal enquiries: LambertJ3@cardiff.ac.uk

Bionote of panel convenors:

Joseph Lambert is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Director of the MA Translation Studies at Cardiff University, UK. He teaches across the BA and MA programmes in Translation and his primary areas of research interest are the ethics of translation and sustainability in the translation industry. In 2023, he published a textbook with Routledge entitled Translation Ethics and he has written widely on the translation profession, questions of pay, status, and regulation in the UK, and translation codes of ethics. His current research includes projects exploring the related themes of working conditions, ethics, and wellbeing among translators.

Mónica Rodríguez-Castro is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA). She teaches courses in specialized translation practice, computer-assisted-translation tools and project management across the BA and MA programmes in Translation. Her primary research interests include translator job satisfaction, translation pedagogy and corpus linguistics. She has published in journals such as Translation and Interpreting Studies, Translation Spaces, and The Interpreter and Translator Trainer.

Minna Ruokonen is a University Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland. She teaches a range of general and specialized translation courses on both BA and MA levels and supervises BA theses. She has studied translators’ experiences of their work from various perspectives, including status perceptions, changes in in-house translators’ work, and literary translators’ technology use. In 2024, she published an overview of research into translators’ job satisfaction with Elin Svahn and co-edited a special issue of Translation Spaces on translators’ and interpreters’ job satisfaction with Elin Svahn and Anu Heino.

Convenor: Khaled Al-Shehari (Qatar University)

In recent years, particularly with the advent of large language models, the rise of generative AI technologies has completely challenged traditional paradigms of translation. It has also posed existential issues for the sustainability of translation practice and pedagogy. Despite their unprecedented potential for efficiency, generative AI technologies disrupt the fundamental principles regarding translator agency, training, and professional status (Lee, 2023; Guerberof- Arenas & Asimakoulas, 2023; Satyanarayan & Jones, 2024). Recent studies have emphasized both the transformational potential and the risk of any AI integration into translation workflows. Research by Canfora and Ottmann (2020) on neural machine translation and by Haq et al. (2021) on the robustness of neural models in translation technology indicates that successful integration of AI raises sustainability questions that must be approached from environmental, labor, and linguistic perspectives. This panel explores the challenges and sustainable solutions for ensuring that the human element of translation remains central.

Based on Kiraly’s (2000) social constructivist approach to translator education and on more recent discussions about AI literacy in translation, such as by Krüger (2023), Abu-Rayyash (2023), and Guerberof-Arenas and Asimakoulas (2023), we explore how translation programs can adapt to the use of AI tools while remaining fundamentally the same. This especially involves adopting “AI literacy” in translation, which refers to the ability to evaluate and use AI tools critically while being aware of their limitationsand ethical implications, aligning with Abu- Rayyash’s (2023) insights into the balanced integration of AI into translation education. The panel explores how the integration of “eco-translatology,” as suggested by Hu and Chaligha (2024), into translation pedagogy can enhance students’ understanding of the connection between the translator and environment. It is important to consider the environmental impact of AI systems, which can be substantial, especially in computationally intensive areas like AutoML and large language model training, whose energy consumption translates into a substantial carbon footprint (Tornede et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2021).

By assembling an interdisciplinary panel of scholars in the fields of translation studies, environmental science, labor economics, and AI ethics, we aim to construct holistic frameworks for sustainable AI integration in translation. Based on the recent theoretical groundwork in post- humanist translation studies (e.g., Cronin, 2017), eco-technological approaches (e.g., Liu, 2023), and critical AI studies (Abu-Rayyash, 2023; Guerberof-Arenas & Asimakoulas, 2023), our thesis develops the implications of an AI-enhanced translation milieu for established translation competencies. With case studies, collaborative problem-solving sessions, and critical reflections on AI-human translation workflows, the panel will invite participation from a broad spectrum of voices from bothacademia and industry. Topics will involve the evolution of translator skills, the sustainability of AI deployment, working conditions in an automated sector, and linguistic diversity. This timely dialogue seeks to move beyond polarized enthusiasm or skepticism, progressing toward an overview of how AI might be useful in supporting sustainable translation practices, with a futurist view that translation will remain a human-centered practice in the long run.

For informal enquiries: kshehari@qu.edu.qa 

Bionote of panel convenors:

Khaled Al-Shehari is an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Qatar University. He earned an MSc (1998) and a PhD (2001) in Translation Studies from the University of Manchester, UK. His current research focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence in translation, exploring AI-driven translation processes across various textual genres and pioneering methodologicalapproaches to AI-enhanced translation pedagogy. He is the co-author of The Arabic-English Translator as Photographer, published by Routledge. His work has appeared in The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, The Translator, Translation Spaces, and edited volumes.

Convenor: Léa Huotari (University of Turku), Olli Philippe Lautenbacher (University of Helsinki), Ashley Riggs (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Federico Zanettin (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

From institutions to grassroots organisations to individuals across the globe, sustainability has become a central concern in thinking about current and future projects and practices. Sustainability, then, is also increasingly reported on across languages and cultures, with such news often circulated in translation. Yet sustainability remains vaguely or inadequately defined and problematized in various disciplines (Engebretsen et al., 2016; Lima & Partidario, 2020), including translation and intercultural communication (Caimotto, 2020; Cronin, 2017), and news translation more specifically. There are nevertheless clear connections between the translation of information in the news media and sustainability, especially given the three areas traditionally covered by the concept (environmental, social and economic):

Sustainability as the property of “being upheld…as valid, correct or true” (to quote from the OED) can be seen as referring to the truth value of news, including translated news, and, in turn, trust in the news or rejection/avoidance of the news by readers. Sustainability can also be understood as referring to the extent to which current media practices including translation can be “maintained or continued at a certain rate or level” (OED), or instead, how they need to evolve in order to survive. The current model of information production increasingly relies on proprietary social media and on the information infrastructures provided by tech industries and conglomerates, including the automated production and translation of news. With the increasing role played by MT and AI in all areas of knowledge production, including the news media (de-Lima-Santos & Ceron 2021, Ding & Sun 2024), we are not only faced with issues of truth/fidelity/ideology, but we must also consider how sustainability is linked specifically to the environment: text production by neural network models requires vast amounts of water, energy, and other resources, in this way failing to align with the conception of sustainability as “designating forms of human activity (esp. of an economic nature) in which environmental degradation” and the “depletion” of natural resources” are “minimized” (OED).

Finally, there is also the issue of how “sustainability” is defined, reported on, and represented in the media (Caimotto 2020, 2023),including constructive news (see, e.g., Riggs 2024), and in social/new media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok), which are currently under-researched in news translation studies (but see, e.g., Verstappen & Opgenhaffen 2024) yet an essential focus for understanding how many, and in particular the youngest generations, consume (translated) news in a rapidly and constantly changing media landscape.
In light of the above, this panel aims to bring together scholars engaged in interdisciplinary work on sustainability, the news media, news translation and combinations thereof. We welcome paper proposals on related topics/themes, including but not restricted to:

• Discourses on sustainability in news across languages and cultures
• The adaptation/localization/remediation of verbal and visual discourses on sustainability in translated news
• Multimodal/intersemiotic news translation and sustainability
• Metaphors of sustainability in news (translation)
• Constructive news about sustainability across languages and cultures/in translation
• Sustainability and news translation as activism
• Machines, AI and the sustainability of news translation
• News translation, sustainability and new media
• Corpus-based studies of the concept of sustainability in translated news

For informal enquiries: lea.huotari@utu.fi

Bionote of panel convenors:

Léa Huotari is a university teacher in French and Translation Studies at the University of Turku. She is currently working as a fixed-termed university lecturer of Translation Studies at the department of Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include translation strategies, translation universals, the visibility of translation and, more recently, journalistic translation and the language of the media. She edited a special issue for Synergies on agentivity and reported discourse in 2022 and published an article on paraprofessional translation in the Finnish work market in MikaEl, in 2023. During the academic year 2023–2025, she is working on her post doc project “Translation as a journalistic tool” at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Tartu.

Olli Philippe Lautenbacher is a university lecturer in Translation studies at the Department of Languages of the University of Helsinki, after having worked for several years at the University of Turku, in the Finnish-French translation section. He first studied cinema at the University of Nancy II and general linguistics at the University of Strasbourg (PhD in 2000), and ever since, his main area of interest has been in the link between language and vision, reading and perception, as well as in the role of redundancy as a meaning-making tool in multimodal communication. This year, he co-edited a special issue of Babel (vol. 70, 1-2)with prof. Yves Gambier. He is member of the steering committee of the Master’s in Translation and Interpreting at his university, as well as member of the editorial team of Mikael – Finnish Journal of Translation and Interpreting Studies. He has been an evaluator for the Centre National du Livre, the journals Parallèles and Synergies Pays Riverains de la Baltique, among others.

Ashley Riggs is Assistant Professor of English Language, Translation and Linguistics at the University of Venezia – Ca’ Foscari, Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies. Her main areas of research are news translation and literary translation, which she combines with the exploration of the interplay between text and image. In 2020, she published the book Stylistic Deceptions in Online News: Journalistic Style and the Translation of Culture (Bloomsbury Academic) and she is currently co-editing Constructive News Across Cultures with Lucile Davier (Routledge, planned for 2025). She has also published articles in Language and Communication, Perspectives, inTRAlinea, and Language and Intercultural Communication, among others. Ashley is on the editorial board of three journals including Hermeneus and is a member of the IATIS Publications Committee.

Federico Zanettin is Full Professor of English Language, Translation and Linguistics at the University of Venezia – Ca’ Foscari, Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies. He investigates translation-related issues with a focus on methodology, and his interests range from news translation to the translation of comics and corpus-based translation studies. His publications include Corpora in Translator Education (St. Jerome 2003, editor, with Silvia Bernardini and Dominic Stewart), Comics in Translation (St. Jerome 2008/Routledge 2014, editor), Translation-driven corpora (St. Jerome 2012/Routledge 2014), New Directions in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Language SciencePress 2015, editor, with Claudio Fantinuoli), News Media Translation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and TheRoutledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology (Routledge 2022, editor, with Chris Rundle). He is co-editor ofthe journal inTRAlinea and serves in the advisory board of The Translator, Translang and Entreculturas.

Convenor: Miguel A. Jimenez-Crespo (Rutgers University)

The centrality of human agents, their user preferences, ethical values and environmental concerns are paramount to the discipline of translation studies (e.g., Chan 2018; Kenny 2020; Massey, Huertas Barros & Katan 2023). With the emergence of Generative AI, there have been renewed calls to direct more efforts towards this key role of human in the wider translation ecosystem (e.g., O’Brien 2023; Jiménez-Crespo 2023, 2024). At the same time, in the AI age it is still more necessary than ever to ethically and “critically evaluate the resource implications of current uses of technology”, as well as to develop “sustainable technology practices at the level of tools and tool use” (Cronin 2019:95). These two issues, human control and autonomy and sustainability, are at the core of human-centered AI (HCAI) approaches (Shneiderman 2020, 2022; Garibay et al 2023). In this paradigm, developers and stakeholders in the language industry and the profession should work towards merging the strengths of humans and machines, with AI implementations directed towards social and environmental well-being. In fact, one of the main goals of HCAI is to achieve “user and environmental protection [through AI governance] against specific AI-incurred risks” (Garibay et al 2023: 413). This is in line with recent research into “social-centered AI” (Wang et al 2024), an expansion of the HCAI paradigm towards the social and environmental needs of humanity, rather than the sole focus on the individual benefits for users in terms of interaction, autonomy or user experience.

This panel thus focuses on the centrality of human translators (professional and non- professional alike) as part of socio-technological and socio-environmental systems in our AI-driven world (Alhborg et al 2019). It builds up on the successful IATIS 2021 panel (15) “Perspectives in translation and digital spaces in the age of ecological awareness” that examined and challenged how the “paradigm of unlimited growth” and expansion could be reconceptualized in an age of ecological awareness (Cronin 2017, 2019). The welcomes contributions that deal broadly with the following subareas in the recent maps of the HCAI research landscape laid out by Capel & Brereton (2023) and Garibay et. al (2023):

• Human teaming with AI: sustainable approaches to human-AI integration for translation, interpreting, post editing (PE or APE) or terminology management. Prompting techniques that promote sustainability and energy consumption.
• EthicalAI. Human perceptions on AI, bias and fairness in NMT and LLMs, autonomy and agency in the human-AI tandem, machine ethics, sustainability values embedded in AI, roles, responsibilities and capabilities of AI for a sustainable future.
• Explainable and interpretable AI. Critical AI literacy approaches, specially from an environmental standpoint, training translators to critically use AI in a sustainable world.

Authors that can contribute to these areas and promote the study of human and social- center AI from any approach in Translation and Interpreting studies are welcome to contribute to this panel.

For informal enquiries: jimenez.miguel@rutgers.edu

Bionote of panel convenors:

Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University, where he directs the MA and undergraduate certificate in Spanish – English Translation and Interpreting. He is the author of Localization in Translation (Routledge, 2024), Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies (John Benjamins2017) and Translation and Web Localization (Routledge 2013). He is currently editing a special issue on Human- Centered AI in translation for the journal InContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism.

Convenors: Lucia Ruiz Rosendo (University of Geneva) and Marija Todorova (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Environmental issues are considered to be increasingly important causes of violent conflicts worldwide. In many regions, environmental degradation intersects with state fragility, exacerbating some of the pre-existing inequalities in groups who are already vulnerable to economic and social hardship. Moreover, climate change is contributing to humanitarian crises worldwide and it is forcing many people to move along migration routes.

Researchers have defined ‘environmental conflict’ as a conflict resulting from degradation caused by human activity or mismanagement, rather than just the exploitation of resources (Dokken and Graeger 1995; Benjaminsen et al. 2012); a category of social conflict that is characterised by the qualitative or quantitative reduction of available environmental resources. Management of natural resources, disposing of hazardous waste, controlling pollution and future development plans have created settings for environmental conflicts due to unequal power between affected parties, as well as differences in the definition of the problems and solutions. The concept of conflict encompasses a broad spectrum of empirical phenomena ranging from disputes between individuals to wars between states, between radical environmentalists and industry, or wars over renewable resources such as agricultural land, forests, water, raw materials and fishing stocks.

Environmental conflict is intrinsically linked to linguistic and translation practices, which so far have not been included in the debate. Cronin (2017, 3) identifies “food security, climate justice, biodiversity loss, water depletion, energy security, linguicide, eco-migration, resource conflicts, [as] some of the issues that will be at the heart of environmental debates in the twenty- first century and that will need to be addressed by scholars and practitioners of translation alike”. There have been studies carried out on the intersection of language, translation practices and environment that bring to attention conflicts between indigenous knowledge and national policies, such as the “colonial encounter in north Norway between Sámi practices for fishing and knowing the natural world, and the conservation policies of state policy makers” (Østmo and Law 2018). Other examples examine the differences in presenting environmental issues on the Greenpeace web sites in different states (Heinz, Cheng, and Inuzuka 2007, 16-36) or incorporating indigenous knowledge providing better approaches to environmental security (Wehi, Whaanga and Roa 2009); or focus on the systematic introduction of the concept of environmental justice in the norm research literature (Stockmann and Graf 2023).

This panel calls for contributions that address how we can better understand translation and interpreting practices related to environmental conflict. Of particular interest will be papers that deal with:

• Thelinguistic implications of environmental conflicts
• Translationof environmentally relevant indigenous knowledge, concepts and practices
• (Non)Translationas environmental resistance
• Environmentaltranslation as activism
• Translationand interpreting practices by environmental defenders
• Translationand interpreting practices in environmental conflicts
• Translationfor socio-environmental justice
• Languagebarriers and environmental injustice
• Significanceof translation in environmental conflict transformation
• Translationand interpreting for climate refugees
• Innovativemethods to understand the role of translation in environmental security.

For informal enquiries: ucia.ruiz@unige.ch

Bionote of panel convenors:

Lucía Ruiz Rosendo is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI), where she is the Director of the Interpreting Department. Her main line of research is interpreting in conflict zones and the history of interpreting, with a particular focus on armed conflicts. Her research has appeared in a range of volumes and journals in the fields of Translation, Peace and Conflict Studies and Social Military History. She is the coordinator of various courses for training interpreters in the field, such as the course run jointly between the FTI and the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross).

Marija Todorova is a Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Language and Culture of the Hong Kong Baptist University. Todorova served as guest editor of Linguistica Antverpiensia (2022) Special Issue on Translation and Inclusive Development. She has published on issues related to interpreters’ role in conflict situations, especially humanitarian settings, and translation and sustainable development. She is the editor of New Voices in Translation Studies and serves on the Executive Council of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS).

Convenors: Ineke Wallaert (Université de Caen Normandie)

The necessity of eco-translation has become undeniable at a time when translation is at risk of being un-diversified by the same forces that threaten the environment. Eco- translation therefore needs to be interpreted as a comprehensive concept, a “symbol that disclose[s] the structural character of the problems while at the same time fostering the ability to act” (Clark p. 4-5), so that the activities, persons, objects and contexts of translation may preserved and sustained as viable expressions and interactions. However, as it happens with most great ideas, eco-translation is now “used” in studies whose objects, methods of analysis and monoglossic redaction are inconsistent with the philosophical foundations of eco-translation, thus undermining the sustainability of the concept.

Intersectionality with the arts, and creativity expressed in ecosemiotic or animalistic approaches (see Maran and Deer, for instance)are efficient ways of highlighting both the diversity of interpretation which eco-translation generates, and the need to fortify it as a paradigm capable of sustaining that diversity. The view of translation as wayfaring, by which the translator becomes instrumental in countering “strategies of legibility to be employed in ways that may be deeply damaging to human flourishing” (Cronin p. 29), and studies which ground their observations in an “ecosophy N” (following Naess’ ecosophy T) also reveal eco-translation as an approach that promotes activism through research. Moreover, the wayfaring prism shows how eco-translation matches other recent proposals in Translation Studies such as contra-instrumentalism and ecosemiotics.

On a textual level eco-translation is already sustainable as an understanding of translation where “the schema of visible and invisible, form and force, is analogous to the distinction between the text as written and what lies beneath, (Deer p. 12), thus functioning as the operational hinge on which the “ecological turn” in translation studies can be consolidated. However, eco-translation has given rise to a variety of interpretations in languages other than English: in France, for instance, it is limited to selecting nature-related study objects or describing eco-friendly material translation practices, while the Dutch “groenvertalen” or “natuurvertalen” and the Spanish “eco- traduccion” seem to tend towards wider hermeneutic perspectives. As a term that is “constantly retranslated and mistranslated” eco-translation “signal[s] the incommensurability of translation” (Apter p. 102 – my translation), and its (un)translatabililty can be seen as both a threat to, and a safeguard of its sustainability.

Topics of interest can include, but are not limited to:

• Investigationsinto the (un)translatability of eco-translation, and/or into the ways in which eco-translation sheds light on the nature of (un)translatability
• Examplesof interpretations and applications of eco-translation in languages other than English
• Comparisons of theoretical foundations and practical implications of eco- translationand other approaches inTranslation Studies (contra-instrumentalism, biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, eco-translatology, translation as rewriting, functionalism, etc).
• Comparativeexaminations of anthropocentric versus eco-centric translations and/or their paratexts and reception
• Ecosemioticmodels which shed new light on translation practices, including translator training, true vs market pricing, or “geological” (Deer) reading.

For informal enquiries: ineke.wallaert@unicaen.fr

Bionote of panel convenors:

Ineke Wallaert is an Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandie, where she teaches translation and directs the master’s programme in Specialized translation and localization, which has recently become part of EC network of European Masters in Translation (2024-2029). Prior to that she taught at HUST (Wuhan, China), the University of Rennes, the UAG (Université des Antilles et de la Guyane), and the University of Strasbourg. She also works as an active free-lance translator specializing in French to English translation of academic articles in sociology, ethnology and anthropology, and is a member of the Caen-based CRISCO research centre in linguistics. After obtaining her MA in translation (DU-EN-ES) at the University of Ghent (her hometown) Ineke Wallaert went on to complete an MSc in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests centre around the ideological and philosophical aspects of translation, with a particular focus on the role of para-texts in interpretation and reception.

Convenors: Renée Desjardins (Université de Saint-Boniface, Winnipeg, Canada), Julie McDonough Dolmaya (York University (Glendon)), Clara Chuan Yu (HKBU) and Émilie Gobeil-Roberge (Université Laval)

In this panel, we will explore the complexity of translation within the content creation economy (also known as the creator economy and influencer economy). There is no doubt that social platforms and the social internet raise many valid concerns: contemporary tech barons have arguably dismantled public infrastructure in favour of algorithmically curated online spaces,which has had an undeniable impact on how information and knowledge is created, circulated, amplified, and goes viral (Chayka 2024). Digital colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019) and the environmental impact of our increasingly digitized lives also warrants pause. However, the social internet is a reflection of who we are and we have agency in shaping its future(Jarvis 2024; Lorenz 2023). Thus, the content we create holds the potential both to disrupt and to uphold democracy and civil society. We argue that the social internet and its platforms can be seen as both an economy and an ecology where extractivism, resistance, and possibility ostensibly co-exist.

Content creation is a rich arena in which to study translation and multilingual communication (Desjardins 2024a), which includes not only the study of the presence of translation (in all its manifestations, e.g. machine translation, AI translation, self-translation, feminist translation, queer translation, crip translation [translation as it relates to disability], multilingual content creation, adaptation), but also, its absence. For instance, when governments failed some of their multilingual constituents in communicating online public health messaging during the pandemic, it was, among others, creators and influencers who translated important information for their fellow citizens (Desjardins, 2022; Desjardins and Laczko, forthcoming). Unfortunately, some creators and influencers have been using translation more nefariously: as a tool in service of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda (cf. DiResta 2024). Now that AI is infiltrating social platforms (Meta2024), new questions arise: do influencers and creators also need machine translation and AI translation literacy? If so, who leads this charge? How might translation policies be developed or revised to shape the ways different manifestations of translation take place on social platforms?

We invite colleagues interested in the social internet, social media, digital multilingual communication, translation and the creator and influencer economies/ecologies to submit to this panel. We seek to engage critically with the multilingual practices, trends, and norms that creators and influencers use whether to accrue followers, monetize, or denounce the very platforms on which they produce content. We are cognizant of the overrepresentation of Silicon Valley platforms, so we welcome proposals on decentralized, citizen-led, and federated platforms (e.g. on the topic of multilingualism and translation on federated platforms like Mastodon). We believe that while platforms are extractivist by their very nature (cf. Fuchs 2021), they also offer spaces of resistance. On this latter point, we invite colleagues studying multilingual resistance movements on social platforms to submit their proposals as well. Finally, the online world moves rapidly and it can be challenging to adapt research methodologies to match its pace (Desjardins 2017; McDonough Dolmaya 2024). We therefore also welcome submissions that tackle, use, or develop digital methods and frameworks.

For informal enquiries: rdesjardins@ustboniface.ca

Bionote of panel convenors:

Renée Desjardins (pronouns: she/her) is an Associate Professor at the Université de Saint- Boniface in Winnipeg (Treaty 1) and a visiting professor at the McGill University School of Continuing Studies. She is the author of Translation and Social Media: In Theory, in Training, and in Professional Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the co-editor of When Translation Goes Digital: Case Studies and Critical Reflections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her most recent work examines translation in the creator, influencer, and gig economies. She currently holds two national research grants from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada: an Insight grant for a project titled: TikTokers, Instagrammers, Podcasters, Livestreamers - and Translators: Translation in the Creator Economy, and a Connection grant as a team member for the LINET, a French-language research group focused on translator education, translation pedagogy, and new technology.

Julie McDonough Dolmaya (pronouns she/her) is Associate Professor in the School of Translation at York University’s Glendon campus. Her research interests centre around translation in digital spaces, with a particular focus on crowdsourcing.Her Wikipedia-related research has explored issues such as linguistic justice, revision practices, and translator motivations within the Wikipedia community. With Minako O’Hagan, she co-edits Digital Translation: International Journal of Translation and Localization, published biannually by John Benjamins. Her book, Digital Research Methods for Translation Studies, was published by Routledge in December 2023.

Clara Chuan Yu (pronouns she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Academy of Language and Culture at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the author of Online Collaborative Translation in China and Beyond: Community, Practice, and Identity (2022) and the Principal Investigator of the project Investigating the Role of Communities and NGOs in Supporting Sustainable Crisis Translation in Hong Kong (supported by Research Grants Council, Hong Kong SAR). In addition to her book, her work has also been published in journals such as The Translator, Translation Studies, The Journal of Specialised Translation, as well as chapters in edited volumes.

Émilie Gobeil-Roberge (pronouns she/her) is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at Université Laval. She teaches translation at the undergraduate level and manages internships for undergraduate and graduate students. Her research centers on the importance of internships in the training of translators, the assessment of skills and metacognitive reflection, and the integration of digital skills in training. She is a member of the Laboratoire d'intégration du numérique en enseignement de la traduction (LINET) an independent research lab, and is currently collaborating on several research projects, including a SSHRC-funded project titled “TikTokers, Instagrammers, Podcasters, Livestreamers - and Translators: Translation in the Creator Economy”, whose principal investigator is Prof. Renée Desjardins.

Convenor: Anne O'Connor (University of Galway)

While it is acknowledged that in a digitally linked world, religious experience can travel at speed and globally, the challenges of the linguistic dimensions of this communication, and the role played by translation have not been adequately considered. As religious content, rituals, and interactions become increasingly present online, attention to translation becomes crucial in the global digital space. The modes of communication of digital religion offer exciting new opportunities for translation scholars which have heretofore been untapped (Blumczynski and Israel 2018). Although much attention has recently been paid to digital religion (Campbell 2012; Dawson and Cowan 2004; Lövheim and Campbell 2017), and to the forces of new media impacting on religious interactions, the linguistic and translational aspect of this communication is rarely mentioned. Only a few scholars, such as Mandair (2019), Beal (2022) and Moll (2017), have examined translation in new forms of religious media, and have demonstrated the complexity of linguistic interrogations and the evolving communicative strategies in the religious realm.

Interaction with technology can encompass religious communities engaging with digital tools—whether through online sermons, virtual worship services, or religious apps—with translation becoming a key factor in ensuring that these practices remain meaningful and accessible across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Much study on digital religion has considered the new opportunities opened up for religion by the internet and user interaction with web-based technologies and social media. For religion online (Helland 2000), organisations and institutions use digital spaces and technological tools to enable a presence that reaches beyond a local or national borders and thereby encounter many translational issues. However, religions also make use of translation technologies in contexts other than digital spaces and it is important to acknowledge the presence of translation technology in physical religious spaces. Where a religious group has a multilingual community, technologies can enable religious practice and communication, especially in the absence of a common language. Moreover, interpreting in religious contexts, which has long been ignored (Furmanek 2022), is primed for innovative uses of technologies to enable communication and understanding. Audiovisual translation, ad hoc interpreting devices, and volunteer-led technical innovations can all be present in religious spaces as communities seek to overcome linguistic barriers to enable religious practices. This panel will address how these technological solutions can be sustainable in the long term and whether they can contribute to a more sustainable future in religious practices.

This panel will focus on the intersection of translation, religion and technology in the diverse religious spaces mentioned above. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theuse of translation technologies in religious contexts
• AI-assistedtranslation and its use in religious communication
• Translationand online religion/religion online
• Institutional religioustranslation practices and technological change
• Volunteerreligious translation activities incorporating technology
• Religioustranslation in informal, low-resource settings
• Translation,religion and social media
• Interpretingin religious settings and translation tools
• Theintersection of religious practice, belief, and community with digital technologies
• Balancingbetween innovation and tradition, between technological advancement and historical sacredpractices and texts
• Alternativediscourses and their presence in digital religious spaces
• Enablingreligious practice through translation technologies
• Adaptingreligious content for new digital environments
• Thedigital realm as both a space for innovation and a challenge for maintaining religious (and linguistic) authenticityand continuity
• AI,ethics and religious translation
• Issuesof gender in religion, translation and technology
• Canonicalreligious texts and technical/digital change
• Untranslatabilityand religion in digital contexts
• Technologyand sustainable futures for religious translation

For informal enquiries: Anne.oconnor@universityofgalway.ie

Bionote of panel convenors:

Anne O’Connor is Personal Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Galway, Ireland. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator funded PIETRA project and leads a team of 7 researchers working on religious translation in the Catholic Church (https://pietra.universityofgalway.ie). She is the Director of the Emily Anderson Centre for Translation Research and Practice at the University of Galway and PI in the HEA-funded MISTE project on sites of translation in contemporary Ireland. She is the author of Translation and Language in Nineteenth- Century Ireland: A European Perspective (Palgrave, 2017) and some recent publications include: “Media and translation: historical intersections,” Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (2022);“Women translators and paratextual authority: The frameworks of religious translation,” Parallèles (2022); “Translation and Religion: Issues of Materiality,” Translation Studies (2021) and the edited collection Tangible translation: Migration and materiality (2022).

Convenors: Henry Jones (University of Manchester), Jan Buts (University of Oslo) and Gabriela Saldanha (University of Oslo)

The concept of sustainability is intimately connected with a wide constellation of other concepts, such as development, environment, growth, justice and equity. A growing body of research has explored the historical development of these concepts across a range of disciplines, including economics, health, politics, and social sciences (Goodland, 1995; Lumley and Armstrong, 2004; Engebretsen, Heggen and Ottersen, 2017; Vogt and Weber, 2019).

By contrast, less scholarly attention has been placed on how these concepts have travelled across languages and cultures, whether through the interlingual translation of key texts or via other forms of interlingual and intercultural mediation. This research gap is significant given the global scope of sustainability-focused agendas, including most notably the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals; and how travelling theories of sustainability are likely to impact the achievement of such ambitious global goals.

In line with the remit of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network (https://genealogiesofknowledge.net/about/) and the Sustainability and Health (SHE) corpus project (https://www.shecorpus.net/), this panel seeks to bring together contributions exploring the impact of translation (broadly defined) on the evolution and reception of the concept of sustainability across languages, cultures and disciplinary domains. In particular, we are interested in contributions which develop novel theoretical and/or methodological approaches to the study of the evolution and contestation of sustainability and related concepts across languages, cultures and disciplines.

Topics to be discussed might include, but are not restricted to:

• Theoreticalperspectives on the concept of sustainability that take into account its roots in different languages, cultures anddisciplines.
• Methodologiesfor the analysis of concepts related to sustainability across languages, cultures and disciplines.
• Howspecific concepts associated with sustainability are translated across languages, cultures and disciplines.
• Specificcase studies of how the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have been adopted and adapted in differentcontexts.
• Theimpact of different understandings of sustainability in particular socio-economic contexts.
• Thenegotiation of measures of sustainability in different economic, social and cultural contexts.
• Differentperceptions of the relevance of sustainability as a concept across different contexts.

For informal inquiries, please contact any of the panel convenors.

For informal enquiries: jan.buts@medisin.uio.no

Bionote of panel convenors:

Jan Buts is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo, Norway. He is a co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, and a member of the Eco-translation Network. His research interests include conceptual history, medical humanities, and translation theory. He is currently involved in the development of the Sustainability CHealth Corpus.

Henry Jones is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded WikiAltMed project (2021-2023). He is also a co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2021). His current research interests lie in the medical and health humanities, translation theory, digital culture and corpus-based methodologies.

Gabriela Saldanha is a researcher at the Sustainable Health Unit, University of Oslo, working on several research and educational projects linked to the Sustainability CHEalth Corpus (SHE) [shecorpus.net]. Her current research focuses on corpus-based conceptual analysis in the discourse of health. She is Project Manager for DEBATING DEMOCRACY, an Erasmus+ Partnership for Cooperation in Higher Education, and a member of the MEDRA (the MEdicalisation of Democratic Rights in debates about Abortion)[uio.no] research team.

Convenors: Maria Piotrowska (Jagiellonian University) and Mariusz Marczak (Jagiellonian University)

In an age of demand for time- and cost-efficient solutions, which fuels the ever-increasing automation of the language service provision (LSP) profession, it seems critically important to successfully implement disruptive technologies such as large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI). More importantly, though, it is necessary to revisit the current practices in the face of changes powered by technological advances so that they take into account not only optimal performance but also the wellbeing of the human actors involved. In other words, provisions for broadly understood sustainability of the LSP sector are necessary. Broad as the term may be, it denotes the need for action within several dimensions, including the facilitation of user experience and proper management in AI-human interaction, the design of sound models of human/machine-driven decision taking, and the effective management of automation-related risks, such as reduced demand, decreased remuneration, lower (service) quality, compromised data confidentiality and privacy, psychological side-effects and pressures of human-machine interaction, as well as increased carbon footprint. What is more, the afore-mentioned action ought to be taken on two different planes: professional and educational. While in the former it will help professionals respond to immediate needs and thus, resolve the most pressing issues, the latter will facilitate the future-proofing of translation students by preparing them to function in the realities of sustainability-driven LSP industry.

This panel explores interconnections between two major themes:

1. Sustainable language service provision in an age of AI and automation with regard to:

• user experience in AI-human interaction;
• management of AI-human collaboration;
• AI-human decision making models;
• AI-related risk management in areas of:
• reduced demand;
• decreased remuneration;
• lower (service) quality;
• compromised data confidentiality and privacy;
• psychological effects of human-machine interaction;
• increased carbon footprint.

2. Adequate translator education in response to AI- and automation-driven language service provision in the areas of:

• methods in translator education in response to the AI-driven revolution of the LSP sector;
• changes to TS educational epistemologies and curricula;
• innovations in course design;
• assessment modes;
• emerging competences and skill sets;
• adaptive expertise of translation teachers and teacher development.

For informal enquiries: maria.piotrowska@uj.edu.pl

Bionote of panel convenors:

Maria Piotrowska is linguist, translation scholar and academic teacher; sworn translator of English; ‘translation practisearcher; Head of the Chair for Translation Studies and Postgraduate Studies for Translators at the Jagiellonian University, founder and president (2013-2023) of the Consortium for Translation Education Research (CTER), the chief Jagiellonian University representative of the EMT Network, a member of the European Society of Translation Studies and EST Summer School Scholarship Committee. Her research field covers the vast area of translation studies with the main focus on translator education. She participates, among others, in the Global Partners in Education project, and in the years 2022-2024 directed TER research platform at the JU. Her academic interest include translation research models, translation pedagogy, translator’s decision-making processes, sociology and psychology of translation, intercultural pragmatics. 

Mariusz Marczak is an Assistant Professor in the Chair for Translation Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He holds a PhD in Linguistics, which he obtained at the University of Warsaw, and a postdoctoral degree (dr hab.), which he earned from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He is President of the Consortium for Translation Education Research (CTER), a textbook appraisal expert for the Polish Ministry of Education and an expert for the Polish Centre for Research and Development. His research interests comprise the implementation of digital technologies in translation or education, the development of translator competence and intercultural competence. He teaches on a European Master’s in Translation (EMT) programme, where he runs courses in telecollaborative team translation, translation technologies, post-editing and localisation. He is the author of numerous publications in the area of technology-enhanced language, translator  and teacher education, as well as a member of professional associations, including the European Society for Translation Studies (EST), the Consortium for Translation Education Research (CTER), the Polish Society of Applied Linguistics (PTLS) and the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).

Convenors: Khetam Al Sharou (Dublin City University/Imperial College London), Christophe Declercq (Utrecht University) and Gys-Walt van Egdom (Utrecht University) 

In the age of widespread adoption of AI-powered content production, the ease and speed with which information can be translated intersemiotically (including filtering, altering) and spread globally necessitate a clear understanding of the nuanced role of translation in the age of (erroneous) information overload. Language automation tools – including automated translation – and the increasing prevalence of their synthetic text output raise significant concerns regarding the formation, dissemination, and entrenchment of various types of erroneous information. These concerns encompass categories that, while not strictly distinct, include approximation (translations deemed 'good enough'), extraneous or excluded information (unsolicited additions or omissions in translations), misinformation (seemingly fluent yet altogether inaccurate renderings), disinformation (deliberate distortions and deceptive intent by the human translator, as well as inherent bias in the technology employed), malinformation (the spread of deceptive content intended to cause harm or manipulate perceptions), overinformation (an excess of information that may be futile, irrelevant, or deliberately abundant, leading to the dominance of certain narratives while marginalising others),and hallucinations (including providing synthetic data for training language models and subsequently increase probability of hallucinations even more).

In this context, it becomes crucial to examine how these types of erroneous information impact communication practices through translation. The proposed panel therefore draws its innovation and relevance from current global efforts to tackle the rising problem of erroneous information and its societal consequences. This panel aims to bring together contributions from various strands of translation studies as well as disciplines sharing interests and research in this expansive issue (such as computational linguistics, digital policy-making, and information sciences). With the common theme of erroneous information through translation, the panel seeks to explore the multifaceted role of translation in the contemporary digital landscape, examining how translation practices, both human and machine-driven, contribute to or combat the proliferation of erroneous information in its many guises. These concerns are reflected in broader global initiatives, such as the European Union's strategic efforts to combat disinformation and other forces that threaten to deliberately thwart truth values and destabilise society at large.

Furthermore, the panel aims to include the ethical and practical challenges posed by different forms of translation in a digital age, aligning with ongoing legislative and policy developments that emphasise the need for accuracy and transparency in communication, be they source material or translated content. Given the risks posed by traditional and social media, by the increasing influence of bots and by synthetic content (text, images and video alike), the interplay between interlingual(machine) translation, human decision- making introduces complex dynamics that demand scholarly attention. By focusing on the intersection of translation studies, computational linguistics, digital policy-making, and information sciences, but equally so allowing from perspectives beyond these domains, this panel promises to offer new insights that address both theoretical concerns and practical implications for the field of Translation Studies, making it a timely and impactful exploration.

Therefore, this panel aims to shed light on the crucial role of translation in navigating the complexities of the information age (such as bias, propaganda and censorship) through a convergence of diverse perspectives. As such, submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Ethicalimplications of machine translation and/or of automated translation through AI-driven applications in information dissemination.
• Comparativestudies of human vs. machine translation in context accuracy.
• Theimpact of (automated) translation on news media and journalism.
• Analysingthe role of automated translation (MT and AI) in social media (spreading or curtailing misinformation).
• Linguisticbiases in machine translation systems and their societal effects.
• Casestudies of misinformation spread through mistranslated content.
• Legaland regulatory perspectives on machine translation and information integrity.
• Therole of machine translation in emergency contexts (crisis or conflicts).
• Ethicalimplications in delivering accurate and timely information to populations affected by crisis or conflict
• Automated translation and trust in public health, political discourse, diplomacy and internationalrelations.
• Analysesof how automated translation systems handle minority and less-resourced languages, addressing issues like linguistic extinction or revival.
• Therole of automated translation systems in customer care and content moderation.
• Casestudies of cultural resilience and automated translation.
• Neurocognitiveperspectives on accuracy.

For informal enquiries: khetam.alsharou@dcu.ie

Bionote of panel convenors:

Khetam Al Sharou is a Researcher at Dublin City University, funded by the Irish Research Council, and an Honorary Research Associate at Imperial College London. Her research focuses on the use of machine translation in social media, specifically examining risks related to information distortion. Positioned at the intersection of Translation Studies, Computer Science, and Natural Language Processing, her work contributes to both academic and industrial fields, particularly in tool development and user experience. She has been involved in several EU/UK-funded projects, collaborating closely with developers and users. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from University College London and an MSc in Translation and Computer- assisted Translation Tools from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She has previously held research and teaching positions at universities in the UK, Belgium, and Syria.

Christophe Declercq is a lecturer at Utrecht University (and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at University College London as well as a Fellow at the University of Antwerp) focuses his research and teaching on the intersection of language technology, cross-cultural communication, and the dynamics of crisis and conflict (be they historic or contemporary). His work spans evaluation of EU-funded language technology projects and emphasising the role of translation technology in making information more accessible within a frame of functionalism.

Convenors: Sharon Deane-Cox (University of Strathclyde) and Robert Neather (Hong Kong Baptist University)

The practices, products, agents and users of museum translation have emerged as significant areas of research interest in Translation Studies, opening up key insights into the mobilisation of translation in these complex sites that interpret the past, make meaning, carry memory, build communities and offer opportunities for both leisure and learning. In such studies, museum translation has been conceptualized in an increasing number of ways that span interlingual translation, intersemiotic translation, cultural translation, visitor experience as translation, and other forms of translational exchange, across a range of institutional settings from heritage and art museums to science museums and archival collections (Mertens and Decroupet 2024; Neather 2021). The primary aim of this panel is to encourage further growth in the area of museum translation by adopting the theme of sustainability as a new lens through which to explore the plurality of translation practices on display. It thus seeks to address, from a translation perspective, a theme that has become a central preoccupation in the Museum Studies literature (Garthe 2023), and in so doing stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration, which has become an increasingly urgent need (Deane-Cox and Côme 2022). By shifting the emphasis away from the Benjaminian trope of ‘translation as survival’ and towards that of ‘translation as sustainability’, we can leverage new lexicons, concepts and approaches that cut across disciplines to enlarge our understanding of how translation is implicated in the transmission of the past and the present into the future.

We welcome contributions that explore the intersections between museum translation and sustainability from any number of ifferent thematic, empirical, methodological and/or theoretical perspectives. For example, focus might be placed on the role, quality and/or visitor reception of museum translation in exhibitions dedicated to issues of environmental or cultural sustainability. Questions might centre on the ways in which translation serves the needs of the future by sustaining the archives, stories and memories of individuals and communities, as mediated through verbal, experiential or virtual channels. Or attention might turn to the management of translation resources, including what is kept, recycled, or discarded, and the environmental footprint of museum translation technologies. A further possibility is to identify or reflect on opportunities for knowledge exchange and other participatory projects that frame translation as a form of sustainable development in the museum context. In sum, the keywords often associated with sustainability – resilience, responsibility, just transitions – all gesture towards the creative and engaged ways in which museum translation can be framed as form of action that shapes how futures are made.

An indicative, but not exhaustive, list of topics is as follows:

• Museumtranslation and the exhibition of environmental issues and actions
• Museumtranslation and the exhibition of threatened cultures, languages, and traditions
• Museumtranslation as a tool for building diverse C resilient communities of practice and memory
• Museumtranslation as an (in)finite resource – exploitation, management, and sustainable development of translation technology
• Environmentalfootprint of museum translation
• Museumtranslation and economic sustainability
• Virtualmuseum exhibitions
• Museumtranslation, sociocultural sustainability and experiential knowing
• Museumtranslation and wellbeing
• Therole of museum translation in fostering diversity, equality, accessibility and inclusion
• Translation,local museums and social sustainability
• Migrationmuseums as sites of translation, intercultural contact and dialogue
• Opportunitiesand challenges of AI translation for sustainability in museums
• Museumaudio description and social sustainability
• Empoweringminority voices in museum presentations
• Museumsand the translation of scientific knowledge

For informal enquiries: sharon.deane-cox@strath.ac.uk

Bionote of panel convenors:

Sharon Deane-Cox is senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her current interdisciplinary research focus is on how translation mediates memory and trauma on textual, interpersonal, intersemiotic, and ethical levels. She has published on retranslation, Holocaust testimony translation, memorial museum audio- guide translation, and heritage translation. She is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory (2022) which includes her work on cross-sectoral collaboration in the heritage space. She is also Associate Editor of the journal Translation Studies and a member of the Young Academy of Scotland, and she sits on the IATIS Regional Workshops Committee.

Robert Neather is Associate Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research has focused mainly on translation in the Chinese museum context and has explored several areas of interest including verbal/visual interactions in translation, intertextuality in the construction of museum narratives intranslation, and issues of expertise and identity in the collaborative production of museum translations. He has published in venues including Meta, Semiotica, Interventions, Babel and The Translator. His book Translating for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites(2024) is published in the Routledge “Translation Practices Explained” series.

Convenor: Philippe Lacour (Universidade de Brasilia)

Epistemic justice is essential for ensuring that all individuals are treated fairly as contributors to knowledge, addressing inequalities that marginalize or silence certain voices (Dotson). By recognizing and combating testimonial and hermeneutical injustices (Fricker)—where biases undermine credibility or societal gaps limit understanding—a more inclusive and equitable society can be created. Indeed, valuing diverse perspectives, like gender (Medina) or race (Mills), not only promotes fairness but also enriches collective problem-solving and innovation.

A document is a cultural production that is recorded in a specific format, intended to communicate knowledge, ideas, or instructions. It can be physical or digital and may include text, images, or other media to convey a message. It is a different notion than data, which represents raw facts or figures that are often devoid of context until processed or interpreted. While data can be a part of a document (e.g., numbers in a report), documents are designed to provide a comprehensive, understandable narrative or message, whereas data is a building block for analysis or further information extraction. Documentation refers to the detailed records and guides that describe the structure, usage, and functionality of the resources or services within a library system, be it physical or digital.

Now, translation is a cultural and epistemic process that can either promote or hinder the equitable dissemination of knowledge. Many marginalized communities communicate in languages that are often overlooked or undervalued in global discourse. When their works are not translated or are poorly translated, it creates epistemic injustice by limiting their ability to share knowledge with wider audiences and participate fully in knowledge production. Translators' choices can reflect biases or cultural assumptions, potentially distorting the original message. For example, a text written in a less dominant language might carry culturally specific concepts that do not easily map onto the dominant language, leading to hermeneutical injustice. This can misrepresent or obscure the original knowledge. Most translation efforts historically have been unidirectional—from languages of marginalized communities into dominant languages like English, rather than the reverse. This imbalance reinforces the global dominance of certain epistemic systems while sidelining others. Activists have drawn attention to the emancipatory potential of ICT for minority languages (Lacour et al., 2013). Some scholars (De Sousa Santos) emphasize the importance of intercultural translation as a way to foster epistemic justice. By creating spaces where knowledge systems interact on equal footing, translation becomes a tool for bridging gaps and valuing diverse epistemologies.

Addressing these concerns about epistemic oppression (Polhaus) involves ethical translation practices, multilingual education, and support for the publication and dissemination of works in non-dominant languages. These efforts of epistemic translatability (Vannini) are vital for fostering a truly inclusive epistemic environment. This problem is particularly important for the (formerly colonized) global south, in order to prepare a truly multilingual world (Bennett).

The panel welcomes proposal on the following themes or questions (among others):

• Can translation help avoid epistemic violence?
• Can intercultural translation promote equitable knowledge exchange? What ethical considerations should guide the process of translation? How can we decolonize translation practices?
• How can translation participate in the definition of a linguistic sustainability? Can translation make up for past epistemic injustice?
• What kind of technology could or should be used in that perspective?
• How should translation technology harness the question of documentation in a sustainable perspective?
• How should data or documents be treated in the perspective of sustainable epistemic justice?

For informal enquiries: traduxio@philippelacour.net

Bionote of panel convenors:

Trained in France and across Europe, Philippe Lacour is currently Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Brasilia (UnB, Brazil). He teaches theoretical (Epistemology, Philosophy of Science) and general Philosophy (introduction, methodology). His research focuses in particular on the Epistemology of Social and Human sciences, including their normative aspects, philosophy of language and translation technology (TraduXio project, https://traduxio.org). He was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh, Paris), investigating the notion of “clinical knowledge“. He is also responsible, in Brasilia, for various research projects about Artificial Intelligence, its challenge, limits and criticism.

Convenors: Hui Wang (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Lisi Liang (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies) and Juan Zhang (Huazhong Agricultural University)

This panel focuses on the agency role of volunteer translators and looks into their active digital participation and engagement in transnational media exchanges, and the pedagogical, technological, and ethical implications of user agency for translation practice and translator training. Volunteer translators in this proposal refer to those media users who exercise their free will to actively interpret, use, and (re)produce and (re)disseminate media content that has been translated. Without professional training in translation, they either work collectively or individually without pay and their translation products have been widely accepted as “an everyday part of life for many ordinary cultural consumers in different sections of the world from the US to China” (Lee 2011, 1131).

The past two decades have seen a notable increase in the visibility of volunteers participating in media exchanges, in particular when they, as media users, have evolved over the years from passive spectators (Di Giovanni and Gambier 2018) to active internet contributors – such as information and knowledge disseminators, content creators and human-AI collaborators – in the transmedia era (Jenkins, 2006; Bruns, 2007; van Dijck, 2009; Li 2023; Bucaria 2023). Remarkably, in today’s AI-driven mediascape, volunteers have been greatly emancipated and empowered to adhere to their own creative intent in the translation process, as seen in the case of AI-generated multilingual video translations and digital avatars. The recent trends where the online videos deliberately deviated from the original for comic effect indicate that volunteer translation becomes more subjective and personalized. Existing literature has primarily focused on the motivation for participation (e.g. Olohan 2012, 2014;O’Brien and Schäler 2010,), translation quality (e.g. Jiménez-Crespo 2017), political engagement (e.g. Baker 2013, 2016) and translation ethics (e.g. Basalamah 2020; Piróth and Baker 2020), the new and evolving role of user agency appears to have gone largely unnoticed in our rapidly expanding landscape of AI. So far, few studies have demonstrated how this innovative and transformative impact on user agency reshapes participants’ engagement, perception, and reception of the various online translation practices and vice versa, and contributes to greater methodological sophistication and theoretical depth.

The investigation of agency in these digital mediascapes will unfold the shifting power dynamics taking place in the translation process, the new translation models emerging from user agency in the synergy of human-AI collaboration, and their impact on the established translation paradigm. This fresh perspective will also enhance the visibility of the target users, making discussions particularly valuable in addressing questions that arise in the digital era, such as the blurring boundaries between professional and non-professional activities, human and digital translators, and their resulting impact on the sustainability of the translation profession.

For informal enquiries: hui.wang@xjtlu.edu.cn

Bionote of panel convenors:

Wanda Hui Wang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Literary and Translation Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research spans the areas of audiovisual translation, media translation, discourse analysis, and translation education. She is the author of a monograph on Discursive Mediation in Translation (2022) and has extensive publications on prestigious translation journals such as Meta, Babel and The Interpreter and Translator Trainer.

Lisi Liang Lisi Liang is a lecturer and Yunshan Young Scholar at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests revolve around audiovisual translation, with special references to the innovative forms of fan-generated subtitling and dubbing, and multimedia studies. She has published widely in journals such as Babel, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, New Voice of Translation Studies, etc. She has recently co-authored a Routledge-edited book, Danmu-mediatedCommunication and Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age.

Juan Zhang is an Associate Professor at Huazhong Agricultural University's School of Foreign Languages. She holds a joint PhD from Central China Normal University and UCL Centre for Translation Studies. A visiting scholar at UCLA, Zhang is active in the Translators Association of China and Hubei Translators Association. She has published 30+ papers in top journals and serves as a reviewer for various international publications. Zhang has led multiple research projects, including National Social Science Fund and Hubei Provincial grants. She has received awards for outstanding papers and frequently gives keynote speeches at academic conferences.

Convennors: Lubna Abdul-Hadi (Mutah University) and Khetam Shraideh (Al-Balqa Applied University)

The interdisciplinary nature of translation studies allows for the integration of diverse perspectives, including the growing emphasis on sustainability, which enables educational institutions to better prepare students for increasingly complex and nuanced global challenges. This panel aims to explore the integration of sustainability into translation studies curricula, focusing on how educators can design undergraduate courses and programs that engage with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while equipping students to face the ethical, technological, and ecological challenges of their work as future translators. The United Nations’ 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provide a framework for collective action, addressing issues such as equitable education, climate change, social justice, and sustainable economic growth. While these goals have been translated into numerous languages, including indigenous languages, to promote a sustainable future across cultures, their real impact depends on adapting and localizing them to the socio-cultural contexts of regional and local communities.

In this context, the panel will explore practical approaches for incorporating the SDGs into translation education, arguing that sustainable translation practices can prepare students to view translation as both a profession and a social mission. As students explore translation’s potential to drive positive change, they will be better equipped to address the complexities of a rapidly evolving global landscape.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Incorporatingthe SDGs into translation pedagogy
• Casestudies on integrating SDGs into translation projects
• Student-ledprojects on SDGs
• Teachingcultural adaptation and localization strategies for sustainable outcomes
• Assessingthe impact of sustainability education and translation
• Teachertraining on sustainable development
• Challengesin translating the SDGs on the regional level in translation pedagogy

For informal enquiries: lubna.abdulhadi@mutah.edu.jo

Bionote of panel convenors:

Lubna A. Abdul-Hadi is Assistant Professor of Translation at the Department of Translation at Mutah University in Jordan. Her research interests include translation theory, gender studies, decoloniality, oral history, and translation pedagogy.

Khetam Shraideh is Assistant Professor of Translation at the Department of English Language and Literature at Al-Balqa Applied University in Jordan. She holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, USA. Her research focuses on AI in translation, literary and non-literary translation, gender in translation, translation pedagogy, and translation theory and practice.

Convenors: Lamis Omar (Dhofar University) and Abdelrahman Salih (Dhofar University)

The accelerated availability of translation technological resources and the current scalability of AI-empowered Machine Translation applications, also known as Neural Machine Translation, have left an unprecedented impact on the sustainability of translation education, research agendas, and translators’ professional practices. This has created an urgency to reconceptualize translation epistemologies, pedagogies, and practices and bridge digital literacy gaps amongst translation students, pedagogues, researchers as well as practitioners. In the same vein, the groundbreaking evolution in technological resources and AI-driven MT has continued to influence intercultural communication and translation practices on all levels, thus leading to a shift in the role of human translators and a pressing need to reconsider conventional translation practices in dehumanized technologically mediated academic and professional settings.

The affordances and smart applications of technological resources and AI functions have started to shape the future of translation education and practice by yielding impactful opportunities. For instance, advancement in technological resources is expected to enhance translation pedagogy by offering real-time and authentic feedback and engaging learners in cross-cultural telecollaborative projects. Furthermore, AI tools have fostered innovation in research by analyzing big multilingual data and streamlined professional practices by improving translation efficiency and accuracy. Yet, the increased evolution of technologically mediated translation practices has not been met with an adequate investigation of their sociocultural and ethical limitations and has been accompanied by constant arguments about the need to reconfigure translators’ epistemic and professional competencies.
Against the backdrop of the ubiquitous advancement and steady popularization of technological translation tools and software, automatic translation applications have hardly been capable of replacing human translators. Nevertheless, the future of competitive human-mediated translation continues to be threatened, unless new initiatives are embraced by academic and professional translation programs and organizations to re-examine existing translation practices. The sweeping technological transformation requires novel epistemic and professional frameworks and an update of research agendas and methods that integrate sustainability concepts and principles with translation discourse in academia and beyond. To sustain an effective role of human translators, translation pedagogues, trainers, and professionals have come under a growing pressure to enunciate critical thinking competencies that bridge existing gaps in MT performance and assume an effective and complementary role in addressing translation issues which require human intervention and decision making such as intercultural communication, terminology management, as well as ethical and societal issues. Sustaining effective translation education and practices involves an acknowledgement of the necessity to introduce higher-order digital literacies to translator training programs, adopting empirical research approaches, and invigorating a new set of quality criteria in evaluating translation products.

Sub-topics for Paper Proposal Submissions:

• The implications of AI-empowered MT for Translation education and training and the need to upgrade the translation curricula
• The need for novel epistemic models and professional frameworks to integrate sustainability concepts and principles
• Affordances and limitations of technological resources (CAT tools, corpora, MT engines) in teaching and practicing translation
• Translators’ emerging digital literacies and skillsets (recognizing MT limitations, using CAT tools andcorpora, pre-editing skills, post-editing skills, navigating multi-data sets for decision-making and research purposes, etc.)
• Complementarity and interaction between human translators and machine translation engines
• The ethical Implications of AI applications, including AI-empowered MT. Examples of ethical issues and concerns include socio-cultural sensitivity, impartiality, reliability, intellectual property issues, etc.

For informal enquiries: lomar@du.edu.om

Bionote of panel convenors:

Lamis Ismail Omar is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Dhofar University, Oman, and professional translator and interpreter since 2001. She holds a doctorate in Translation Studies from Durham University, the UK, and has extensive experience in teaching translation, conference interpreting courses and ESL courses in Damascus University and currently in Dhofar University. Dr Omar’s scholarly achievements include published translations, peer-reviewed research papers in high-ranking journals, as well as contributions, as presenter and convener in conferences, webinars, and symposia on the national, regional, and international levels. Her research interests include translating literature, cognitive metaphor theory, machine translation, translation pedagogies, cross- cultural communication besides a general interest in applied linguistics.

Abdelrahman Abdallah Salih: works as an Associate Professor of English and Applied Linguistics and official translator at Dhofar University, Oman. Before this, he taught EFL/ESL courses, linguistics courses and translation courses for many years in Malaysia and Sudan. His research and teaching interests include applied linguistics, interculturality, and global English, besides a general interest in Translation Studies. Dr Salih has published prolifically in peer-reviewed journals and made commendable contributions as a presenter, panel convener and keynote speaker at regional, national, and international conferences, webinars, and symposia. He is also an active member of several professional bodies and associations. His research interests include EFL/ESL teaching and learning, applied linguistics, cross-cultural communication, and translation pedagogies.

Convenors: Liwen Chang (The Chines University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen), Shuyin Zhang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen) and Yingyi Zhuang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

During the recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) development, majors in the humanities, including translation and interpreting, have faced significant challenges. The integration of AI into professional translation and interpreting practices has profoundly transformed these disciplines, resulting in a reevaluation of pedagogical approaches within translation and interpreting studies. Modern AI tools have become essential components of professional practice. These tools provide new opportunities to improve educational outcomes by providing personalized learning experiences, data- driven performance analysis, and sophisticated simulation capabilities.

However, the integration of AI in translating and interpreting education requires a balanced approach that uses technological advantages while preserving fundamental human competencies and ethical principles. This technological integration presents challenging issues that demand careful attention, though, and educational institutions must address the evolving skill set requirements for language professionals, deal with concerns about language's communicative dehumanization, and confront emerging ethical issues.

We are now at an important junction of transformation to ensure a sustainable future of translation and interpreting education in an era of rapid AI developments. Success requires collaboration among scholars, educators, and practitioners to establish ethical guidelines, inclusive frameworks, and responsible approaches. By offering a platform for conversation, this panel seeks to shape a forward-looking vision for responsive, sustainable, and ethically grounded translation and interpreting education.

Possible topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• Curriculum design
• Skillset evolution
• Sustainability of pedagogical practices Human-AI collaboration
• Ethical issues
• Challenges in T&I education
• (Resisting) Dehumanization in the era of AI

For informal enquiries: changliwen@cuhk.edu.cn

Bionote of panel convenors:

Liwen Chang is Associate Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, where she serves as Programme Director of MA in Translation & Interpreting and MA in Simultaneous Interpreting. She received her PhD in Interpreting Studies from The University of Manchester. Her research interests include interpreting studies, AI-assisted interpreter training, interpreting technologies, social semiotics, and multimodality. She is also a practicing translator specializing in contemporary literature, religion, and psychology, with a portfolio that includes over 20 translated books.

Shuyin Zhang is Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She received her PhD in Translation Studies from University College London and is a certified interpreter accredited by the Chartered Institute of Linguists, UK. Her research interests include Digital Translation Studies, Educational Technology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Digital Humanities. Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (SSCI Q1) and acts as a reviewer for Taylor & Francis. Her work has been published in SSCI-indexed and ESCI-indexed journals, including Translation and Interpreting Studies and Revista Tradumàtica.

Yingyi Zhuang is Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests span several areas, including translation studies, linguistics, educational and translation technologies, and digital humanities. Her work has appeared in SSCI-indexed and EI-indexed journals. She served as a guest editor for a special issue of International Journal of Translation, Interpretation and Applied Linguistics. She is the principal investigator (PI) of three pedagogical research grants at national, provincial and university levels, and the co- investigator of three National Social Science Foundation projects in China.

Convenors: Gary Massey (ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences) and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow (ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences)

Current concepts of sustainability encompass overlapping environmental, social and economic dimensions (Purvis et al. 2019). At their intersection stands work and professional sustainability, best illustrated by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 “Decent work and economic growth” (UN 2023), where decoupling growth from environmental degradation and greater inclusivity are central aspirations. While translation and intercultural communication scholars have started to address the environmental pillar of sustainability, socio-economic aspects of sustainable work are rarely mentioned (Moorkens 2022).

In all dimensions of sustainability, agency is seen as key to driving human development, while enhancing agency is pivotal to implementing sustainable transformations. Approaches to advancing sustainability are frequently informed by Bandura’s (2006) influential social cognitive theory, which identifies four core features of agency (intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness). These are assumed to operate in three modes: individual, proxy (e.g., through lawyers or representatives) and collective (organisations, associations).

While the agency concept features strongly in intercultural communication research, it remains under-investigated in translation and language industry studies – despite emerging as a trope for distinguishing human added value in the AI age, particularly since the perceived threat of AI to language professionals’ socio-economic status (Asscher 2023). Remarkably, though, high levels of agency have been attributed to generative AI systems by referring to Bandura’s four features (Sharma et al. 2024). This blurs previously unchallenged agentic distinctions between human and artificial intelligence, adding even greater complexity to the nexus between agency and sustainability.

Focusing on the language professions and industry, this panel seeks to explore and identify interrelationships between various modes of agency and the socio-economic, professional dimensions of sustainability. We invite conceptual, theoretical and/or empirical contributions dealing with aspects of these interconnections. Contributions may deal with, but are not limited to, topics explicitly relevant to the language professions and language industry such as:

• Models and methods to investigate socio-economic/professional sustainability in translation
• Critical reviews of agency concepts and models related to socio-economic/professional sustainability
• Modes of agency promoting socio-economic/professional sustainability
• Agency in socially and/or economically sustainable translation practices/processes
• Agentic modes of sustainable translation to attain degrowth (crowdsourcing, etc.)
• Human versus AI agency in sustainable language professions
• Educational/training initiatives towards socio-economic/professional sustainability
• Ethics, agency and socio-economic sustainability in the language industry

For informal enquiries: maureen@ehrensberger.org

Bionote of panel convenors:

Gary Massey was a Professor of Translation Studies, Director of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and Deputy Dean of the School of Applied Linguistics at the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland before retiring in 2022. He was also a Vice- President of CIUTI. He continues to research, publish and lecture in the fields of language industry studies, cognitive translation studies, translator education and translation teacher development. He has been a member of IATIS for a number of years and serves on the boards of various translation studies journals.

Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow was Professor of Translation Studies at the ZHAW Institute of Translation and Interpreting in Switzerland until her retirement in 2022. Her main research interests continue to be cognitive ergonomics, the language industry and MT/digital literacy.
Before she retired, she was co-investigator of a major project on MT literacy funded by swiss universities. She has been a member of IATIS for many years, as well as a member of the EST Board since 2016 and EST Secretary General since 2019. She is an associate editor and reviews editor of Target and also serves on other editorial boards.

Convenors: Federico Gaspari (Università San Raffaele di Roma, Italy) and Joss Moorkens (SALIS & ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland)

The connection between translation and climate change has been explored from a number of perspectives (e.g. Cronin, 2017; Pi and Zhong, 2024; Todorova, 2022), occasionally with attention specifically paid to the role of technology (e.g. Cronin, 2019; Shterionov and Vanmassenhove, 2022). This relationship has become increasingly important in light of the recent fast-paced progress in machine translation and the rapid transition from neural approaches to the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and multilingual large language models (LLMs) in translation tasks, due to the associated ever growing rise of energy consumption and CO2 emissions of AI-based systems. In parallel, some scholars have begun to establish connections between ecolinguistics and translation studies (e.g. Diamanti, 2022). In this context, Moorkens et al. (2024) put forward a triple bottom line model for evaluating the sustainable use of automation technology in translation. This model foregrounds the importance of sustainability and is designed to strive for a balance between the potentially competing priorities of people, planet, and performance, in an effort to promote consideration of the broader long-term undesirable effects vis-a-vis the short-term benefits of automating translation in the age of AI.

Somewhat ironically, technological progress in translation and other fields exacerbates already existing global divides and disparities across language communities, also with specific regard to the availability and quality of language and translation tools (Gaspari et al., 2023; Gaspari et al., 2024). In addition, the discourse on climate change appears to be heavily influenced by colonial and extractive practices, such that much of the information, news and research on climate change (whether genuine and scientifically sound, or fake and manipulated by players with vested interests) circulates in English, and is translated from or into this language (Cabezas-García and León-Araúz, 2022). This happens even though the effects of global warming and climate change disproportionately affect populations and areas where other languages are dominant. These circumstances create a vicious circle that quashes alternative and resistant narratives promoted by well-meaning advocacy and pressure groups, activist networks and NGOs that work on climate change.

The impact of climate change across the world is arguably one of the greatest and most intimidating challenges of our times, with unparalleled economic, social and political consequences on a global scale that threaten the livelihoods of entire populations across national, linguistic and cultural borders. In this worrying scenario of vital importance especially for future generations, there is a pressing need to promote the role of translation in driving forward a broad sustainability-oriented agenda, that involves both grassroots and citizen-level awareness (e.g. Rudiak-Gould, 2012) and larger, more coordinated initiatives (Ødemark et al., 2024). This panel aims to provide an inclusive and diverse forum for debate on these topical issues of global interest, involving academics, researchers, scholars, professionals, educators and scientists in the fields of translation and interpreting (in all their forms), (eco-)linguistics, digital and intercultural communication, technology, sustainability, and climate change.

Tentative list of subtopics

The panel solicits proposals for theoretical and methodological, as well as interdisciplinary and applied contributions, including position papers and case studies focusing e.g. on translation teaching and the profession, from a variety of frameworks; while abstracts of paper proposals must be in English for refereeing purposes, submissions covering diverse languages and language pairs are welcome. Topics of particular interest for the panel include, but are not limited to, the following, noting that ‘translation’ refers to all forms of cross-linguistic practice and also includes interpreting and any type of linguistic and/or cultural mediation:

• Translation studies and ecolinguistics
• Translation and climate change activism and advocacy
• The role of translation and technology in communicating science and information on climate change across languages and cultures
• Positioning sustainability in translation (including in the profession and in teaching) and/or translation studies
• Engaged research in translation studies in relation to technology, climate change and sustainability
• Identifying and combating hegemonic and extractive practices across languages and cultures that aggravate climate change
• Promoting initiatives and campaigns related to climate change and sustainability through translation across languages and cultures
• The politics and ethical dilemmas of using AI translation in relation to climate change and sustainability
• Applying and refining the triple bottom line model of translation automation in relation to climate change and sustainability issues
• Best practice for scientifically sound and effective AI-enhanced automated translation of news, information, research and science related to climate change
• Translation technologies, climate change and sustainability in relation to human nutrition and food security

For informal enquiries: federico.gaspari@uniroma5.it

Bionote of panel convenors:

Federico Gaspari holds a PhD in machine translation from the University of Manchester (UK) and is an Associate Professor of English language, translation and linguistics at the University “San Raffaele” of Rome (Italy). He is affiliated as a Research Fellow to the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University (Ireland), where he works on international research projects devoted to language and translation technologies. His main research interests focus on translation technologies, especially machine translation (evaluation, post-editing, online use, use by professional translators) and AI-driven language and translation tools, applied translation studies, corpus linguistics and descriptive and variationist English linguistics.

Joss Moorkens is an Associate Professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies in Dublin City University (DCU), Science Lead at the ADAPT Centre, member of DCU’s Institute of Ethics, and board member of the European Masters in Translation Network. He has published over 60 articles, chapters and papers on the topics of translation technology interaction and evaluation, translator precarity, and translation ethics. He is General Coeditor of the journal Translation Spaces, coeditor of a number of books and journal special issues, and coauthor of the textbooks Translation Tools and Technologies (Routledge 2023) and Automating Translation (Routledge 2025).

Convenor: Majda Atieh (Sultan Qaboos University)

Western hegemony has always manipulated the imagination of the future in order to maintain global power. Such speculative control has particularly authorized the west’s monopolistic militarization of an epistemic narrative whose translation infringes collective future scenarios and environmental transformations for the Global South communities. The de facto power of the west’s insulating narrative is networked through biased legacy media platforms that visibly condone the despoliation and violent policies of corporate industries in the Global South. Such monolithic advocacy of ecological exploitation and human insecurity has spurred worldwide anxieties for articulating a speculative future to suspend the west’s translation of irresponsible future imaginaries that inconsiderately normalize human isolation and insecurity, linear economy, environmental degradation, and social conflict in the Global South.

This panel addresses the current concerns with the west’s neo-colonial technocentric mindset that homogenizes cognitive bias and translation opacity to thwart the non-westerners’ recognition of human and non-human equity and arbitrate their limited accessibility to the future. In this regard, the panel highlights the urgent calls for demilitarized technologies of translation and narration to communicate an accessible future of environmental consciousness, equitable sustainability, and biodiversity
Topics of interest also include, but are not limited to:

• Extractiveindustry and ecological violence and their counter translation in the speculative responses of the Global South
• Speculativetranslation of ecological modernity in the Global South
• Speculativetranslation of gender equality in the Global South
• Biodiversityimaginary and its translation in the Global South
• Interculturalcommunication of Panglossian narratives on the Global South
• Translationsof Feminist political ecology in the Global South
• Subalternecology and speculative activism in the literature of the Global South
• Ecofeminismand translation in the speculative fiction of the Global South
• Pedagogyof hope and translation of degrowth in the science fiction from the Global South
• Translation,labor in/justice, and the speculative narratives from the Global South
• Intercultural communication of post-now imaginaries of sustainable technologies on the Global South
• Interculturalcommunication of new equitable and sustainable futures of labor in the literature of the Global South

For informal enquiries: m.atieh@squ.edu.om

Bionote of panel convenors:

Majda Atieh is a Fulbright scholar and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literatures at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. Her research focuses on digital humanities, sustainability and cultural translation, museology and architecture in literature. Atieh serves as an area chair and convenor of the Collecting and Collectibles panels for the Popular Culture Association’s annual National Conferences (USA). Atieh has published on various topics in refereed journals and edited collections by Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford InterDisciplinary Press, Ohio University Press, and Facts on File.

Convenors: Mona Baker (University of Oslo, Norway), Julie Boéri (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar / University of Manchester, UK) and Eivind Engebretsen (University of Oslo, Norway)

Aiming to explore emerging and longstanding intersections between translation and medicine, this panel invites contributions on the translation (both interlinguistic and metaphorical) of reproductive health concerns, including family wellbeing, infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, birthing, and other aspects of sexuality, with particular reference to the sustainability of healthcare practices and modes of interaction. The point of departure is that translation in the field of healthcare – as elsewhere – does not merely involve transferring medical knowledge, unmediated, from bench to bedside, but is in practice a complex process of knowledge (re)mediation across languages, cultures, media, as well as scientific, institutional and legal frameworks that have to be negotiated in ways that are sustainable and address the needs of each community. This raises the question of how knowledge about reproductive health – a priority agenda in the Arab World and globally to improve social cohesion – translates and is mediated across contexts, and how these translational acts relate to the Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 3 (Good Health and Well Being) and Goal 5 (Gender Equality).

To address this pressing question and its implications for sustainable health services across different communities, the panel hopes to draw on expertise at the intersection of health studies, medical humanities, medical anthropology, Islamic studies, translation studies, intercultural communication, law, and (social) media studies, in order to promote reproductive health globally, while attending to regional and local specificities and concerns.

Themes of interest include but are not restricted to the following:

• The mediation of legal, medical, and bioethical discourses/practices related to the (non)reproductive body and its potential impact on the achievement of SDG5 targets, especially enhancing women’s decision-making power over their sexual and reproductive health and rights
• The mediation of popular culture’s representations of the (non)reproductive body
• The (lack of) provision of translation and interpreting for immigrants and others not fluent in the national language in clinical encounters and its impact on achieving SDGs 3 and 5 targets
•  Practices of knowledge mediation in the reproductive health clinical encounter
•  Reproductive health and reproductive justice in war, migration and exile

For informal enquiries: mona@monabaker.org

Bionote of panel convenors:

Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT), University of Oslo, where she is responsible for developing the Sustainability & Health Corpus, co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, and Honorary Dean of the Graduate School of Translation & Interpreting at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Contact: mona@monabaker.org.

Julie Boéri is Associate Professor in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester. She is Vice-President of IATIS, the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies, and the Director of publication of Encounters in Translation. Her research focuses on the translational nature of socio-political and technological change, with a particular interest in the ethics and politics of mediation and communication in professional, artistic and scholarly practice. julie.boeri@manchester.ac.uk 

Eivind Engebretsen is Director of the SUSTAINIT Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. He specializes in global health humanities, has pioneered new approaches to the study of the interfaces of political ideologies and knowledge production in healthcare, and has undertaken extensive research on the foundations of Evidence-based Medicine. He is currently leading a centre of excellence (SFU) on medical decision making, and is Circle U Professor of Global Health and Dean of the Circle U Open Campus. eivind.engebretsen@medisin.uio.no

Convenors: Mattea Cussel (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Maialen Marin-Lacarta (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

With the increasingly rapid development and popularisation of artificial intelligence over the past few years, many translators’ and interpreters’ associations across the world have issued declarations and manifestos stating their position in relation to its implementation in translation processes. Responses to the use of artificial intelligence in translation and publishing have also been issued in writers’ and translators’ blogs, publishers’ websites, journal articles, and social media, among other venues. In addition, the automation of translation processes is not new and significant changes have occurred since the introduction of neural machine translation in 2016.

Within this panorama, the translation industry provides an excellent case study to reflect on the role of artificial intelligence in society. Beyond its impact on the translation profession, it is necessary to conduct a global and translingual examination of responses to the irruption of AI, in terms of how they reflect the social and political discourses and concepts and frames of reference that are being employed to think about human/machine labour, the value of knowledge and projections for the future of our world. By examining declarations, manifestos and position articles written in as many languages as possible, the panel will investigate how responses and positions are articulated in different languages, how they reflect a particular understanding of the consequences of automation and how these formulations relate to one other. The various papers presented in the panel will allow us to weave discursive, conceptual and historical connections through languages and across contexts. Local histories of the role of automation in society and its impact on life and labour in various regions of the world will help contextualise and decentre our debate.

The panel will include papers that address topics such as:

• The relationship between the irruption of AI in the translation profession and the history of automation in different regions of the world, including its social and political consequences.
• Discourses and frames of reference in reactions to AI across various translationprofessions, such as literary,audiovisual, technical, notarised legal translation, and interpreting, among others.
• Formalpositions on AI and its impact on human/machine labour, knowledge and the future in different venues: manifestos and declarations by translators’ and interpreters’ associations; public institutions; publisher websites; audiovisual company websites; and translation agency websites.
• Informal reactions to the irruption of AI in different venues: translators’social media, publishers’ social media,blogs.
• Legalresponses to the role of AI in the translation and publishing industries.

For informal enquiries: mattea.cussel@uab.cat

Bionote of panel convenors:

Mattea Cussel is Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research on the sociology of translation, including areas such as methodological nationalism in translation studies; the translation and transnational reception of Latinx literature; and the politics of translation in global academia has been published in book chapters and journals such as Translation Studies, Translation and Interpreting Studies and Social Science Information. Her book Migration Literature in Translation: From Latinx Texts to Transnational Readers appears in Routledge (2025). She is currently co-editing the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics (with Jonathan Evans and Fruela Fernández).

Maialen Marin-Lacarta is Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Prior to joining UAB, she was Principal Investigator of the DigiTrans project at the Open University of Catalunya. Between 2014 and 2020, she was Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Marin-Lacarta has published her research in journals such as The Translator, Translation Studies, Perspectives and Meta. She has guest coedited a special issue on Ethnographic Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies for The Translator and is part of the editorial team of Encounters in Translation and 1c11: A Journal of Translation History.

Convenors: Maialen Marin-Lacarta (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Manuel Pavón-Belizón (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Relationality has shaken some parts of the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences in the last fifty years as a reaction to an excessive focus on representation, discourse and meaning. Some of the most widespread theories and concepts in this regard include actor-network theory (Latour and Woolgar 1979), agencement or assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006), entanglements (Barad 2007), intra-action (Bennett 2010) and the posthuman (Braidotti 2013), among many others. There have also been attempts to cross-fertilise some of these theories, such as assemblage theory and actor-network theory in disciplines like geography. These theories have several features in common, such as a rejection of the nature/culture dualism, a concern for materiality (objects, bodies, matter) and its agency, and the understanding that the human, non-human, technological and natural co-construct our world. This involves the agreement that action results from the interaction of initially unrelated elements –with some theories focusing more on the interconnectedness of those elements, while others focus more on non-human agency (Grusin 2015). Theories outside of the Global North, such as classical Chinese theories of action and metaphysics of agency, also reflect a relational understanding of agency (Valmisa 2021). In translation studies, actor-network theory has been the most widely used relational approach so far, while other contemporary relational approaches are gaining traction. In this context, affordance theory has also been applied in translation studies to discuss its relevance for translators’ actions (Robinson 2022).

In parallel, translation studies scholars have increasingly paid attention to less translated languages and literatures (Branchadell and West 2004). This panel also aims at decentring translation studies and engaging with theories as well as case studies that have to do with less-translated languages and cultures. In the title of this panel, we refer to less-translated languages understood as a term that includes minority languages as well as languages like Arabic and Chinese that, though widely used, have a lesser presence in translation flows.

This panel aims at addressing cutting-edge research that engages with a relational understanding of the translation process from/into/between less translated languages for different kinds of textual production (including, but not restricted to, literary, humanistic, scientific, technical or audiovisual texts). The panel welcomes presentations that engage with topics such as:

• Different contemporary and/or classical theorizations of relationality, includingthe ones mentioned in this call,that help us explain distributive agencies in the translation process of less-translated languages and cultures.
• Theories outside of the Global North and their possible application to understand multiple agencies and the importance of materiality in the translationprocess of less-translated languages.
• Methodologiesthat help us uncover multiple distributive agencies in the translation process, such as ethnographic approaches, and archival and historical approaches.
• Case studies that showcase the application of relational theories highlightingtheir potential and limitations withrespect to non-relational understandings that focus on human individual agents.
• Casestudies that focus on human-machine, human-text and human-human interaction from a relational perspectivein the translation process.

For informal enquiries: maialen.marin@uab.cat

Bionote of panel convenors:

Maialen Marin-Lacarta is Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Prior to joining UAB, she was Principal Investigator of the DigiTrans project at the Open University of Catalunya. Between 2014 and 2020, she was Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Marin-Lacarta has published her research in journals such as The Translator, Translation Studies, Perspectives and Meta. She has guest coedited a special issue on Ethnographic Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies for The Translator and is part of the editorial team of Encounters in Translation and 1c11: A Journal of Translation History.

Manuel Pavón-Belizón is a lecturer at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona, where he teaches Chinese/Spanish translation. He is also the coordinator of UPF’s MA in Translation for Global Languages (Chinese-Spanish). He obtained his PhD at the Open University of Catalonia with a thesis on the translation and circulation of contemporary Chinese thought. His research interests focus on translation in the humanities and social sciences, modern and contemporary Chinese intellectual history and literature.

Convenor: Abdel-Wahab Khalifa (Queen's University Belfast)

This panel examines translation’s role in shaping global perceptions and advancing, fulfilling or complicating diplomacy objectives through soft power and propaganda. While integral to cultural, public, digital and book diplomacy, translation’s strategic deployment to influence (inter)national relations and nations’ image-building remains underexplored (Khalifa and Haddadian-Moghaddam, 2025).Given the mounting importance of sustainable and equitable documentation of cultural memory, traditional centres of knowledge production are being challenged as digital platforms enable the rapid translation and circulation of competing narratives.

Building on recent scholarship (e.g., Khalifa and Haddadian-Moghaddam, 2024; Carbó-Catalan and Roig- Sanz, 2022; Batchelor,2019), this panel explores how translation functions as an instrument of influence across diplomacy, soft power and propaganda, including the power hierarchies, nation branding, state and non-state initiatives and cultural representation in shaping public opinion and transnational discourse. While diplomacy, soft power and propaganda operate as distinct mechanisms of influence, they often overlap and intersect. Translation mediates, enables, transforms and/or complicates these processes, serving as a bridge and a barrier: amplifying voices, contesting narratives and straddling the fine line between representation and distortion.

This panel welcomes submissions offering theoretical frameworks, case studies or practical applications exploring methodologies for measuring the effects of translation initiatives from different periods, geographical regions and socio-political contexts.

Potential topics include:

• Examining historical and contemporary case studies of how translation has served diplomacy, propaganda and/or soft power objectives in various geopolitical contexts, from cultural Cold War programmes (e.g., USIA Book Translation Program, Mir Publishers and Information Research Department) to modern digital diplomacy, including how state and non-state actors wield translation in contemporary conflicts and social movements.
• Assessing how digital platforms, machine translation and AI shape and transform cross-cultural narratives, including how translation empowers activist translation communities, challenges dominant narratives, disseminates or counters propaganda and intersects with the spread of and/or resistance to (mis/dis)information.
• Analysing how institutional and individual actors, independent organisations and grassroots networks deploy translation across diverse domains (e.g., literary translation, interpreting, audiovisual media and multilingual visual content) and examining the role and agency of translatorial agents in shaping, supporting, contesting and/or resisting narratives.
• Investigating how translation is used as a tool of soft power in political conflicts and advocacy, including its role in amplifying marginalised voices, suppressing dissent and/or mediating between official and counter-narratives.
• Exploring how state and non-state actors use translation to (re)position and/or (re)brand themselves locally and globally, including how translation initiatives (re)shape (inter)national narratives, document or manipulate cross-cultural encounters and influence the representation of cultural heritage to achieve strategic objectives.
• Scrutinising how translation operates within seemingly innocuous mediums (e.g., social media platforms, periodicals, literary awards and translation prizes) and its entanglement with censorship, ideology and/or institutional power structures, often in ways that go unnoticed, misrecognised or unchallenged.
• Addressing the ethical implications of translation in contexts of misrepresentation, information control and manipulation, including how AI and digital platforms are used to shape narratives, influence perceptions and/or mediate information flows to advance diplomacy, propaganda and/or soft power objectives.

For informal enquiries: a.khalifa@qub.ac.uk

Bionote of panel convenor:

Abdel-Wahab Khalifa is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests include the sociology of translation and interpreting, the role of translation in cultural diplomacy and the translation industry, with a focus on Arabic. His work on translation, diplomacy and soft power has appeared in journals such as Diplomatica and Perspectives, alongside contributions to volumes including The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Censorship. Khalifa’s other publications include (co-)authored and (co-)edited works such as Translation of Arabic Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 2010–2020, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation, Translation and the Power of Agency and Translating Modernity: (Trans)Formations of a Concept. A Harry Ransom Fellow, he serves on advisory boards for organisations and publications, including The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry. Khalifa is an executive board member of the Association for Translation Studies in Africa (ATSA) and the IATIS Regional Workshop Committee, and serves on the Editorial Board of The Translator.