Keynote Speakers
Revisiting key notions of intercultural communication
Intercultural communication is often framed in terms of skills, strategies, and competencies aimed at navigating cultural difference in effective and appropriate ways. While such approaches have value, they risk reducing complex human encounters to technical checklists, leaving little room for genuine, deeper engagement. This plenary talk revisits familiar concepts of intercultural communication such as embracing, empathy, openness, active listening, respect, reflexivity, and tolerance of ambiguity while critically examining how these notions are commonly viewed, understood, and practiced. By reimagining intercultural communication as an active dynamic practice grounded in responsibility, relationality, and openness to change rather than a set of static transferable skills, this talk invites scholars and practitioners to reconsider what it truly means to communicate across difference in an increasingly interconnected yet deeply divided world.
Ioannis Karras, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Communciation, Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting, Ionian Univeristy, Greece
Dr. Ioannis Karras is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Communication at Ionian University, Greece. He holds a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Calgary, Canada; an M.Ed. in TEFL from the Hellenic Open University (Greece); an M.Sc. in Intercultural Communication from the University of Warwick (UK); and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
He has over 25 years of teaching experience in applied linguistics, TEFL methodology, and intercultural communication across undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs. Moreover, he has lectured as a visiting professor and invited speaker at universities worldwide, delivered numerous keynote and conference presentations, and conducted seminars and workshops for national and international audiences. He has (co-)authored and edited several books, as well as book chapters and articles published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, in the areas of his scholarly expertise.
Clare Donovan, ESIT, Sorbonne Nouvelle, and ISIT, Université Panthéon Assas
Our students are all different – should training be the same?
For all their differences, all interpreters need to be capable of understanding any speaker in any context. This requires "intuition", the ability to make educated guesses and nimble analysis.
Conference interpreting is a profession marked – at least in Western Europe – by a strong professional identity, shared values, and norms. The single international association, AIIC, founded in 1953, still carries great weight. The profession exerts marked, and often prescriptive control over training. Efforts have been made over the years to coordinate training practices. This has been done through various channels – and with input from major recruiters, notably the EU Institutions. Key examples include the EMCI in Europe and PAMCIT in Africa. AIIC contributes actively to these efforts, through its stated norms and definitions, as well as its own training initiatives. The aim behind such endeavors is to spread good practice and establish standards, including, in the case of the consortia, core curricula.
Yet, the cultural and linguistic context of our training programs differs markedly from one region to another. In this presentation, this will be illustrated by a comparison of CI students in France with those in West Africa. The history and current practice of interpreting will be considered in both cases, as well as the students' linguistic background, and cultural norms. Moreover, such differences are not only geographical but also generational.
Given this student diversity, do coordinated training recommendations rooted in a specific mainstream legacy allow for sufficient flexibility? The question merits our attention as students need to relate to both the teaching material and training practices. Inappropriate source texts or instruction and feedback that are culturally "inaudible" could severely impair learning.
A discussion will be engaged around this query to consider whether training programs should be more tailored to local circumstances or whether a universalist approach retains relevance.
Clare Donovan graduated from ESIT in 1982 as a Conference Interpreter. She worked as a freelance interpreter for International Organizations, Ministries and Conferences, drawing on her professional experience to underpin her research and her doctoral thesis on Fidelity in Interpretation, submitted in 1990. She taught at ESIT, Sorbonne Nouvelle, from 1984 to 2021 in various capacities, including Director for the Conference interpreting Master. She currently teaches at ISIT in Paris and at Lomé University in Togo where she has co-founded a Conference Interpreting Master course. She headed the Interpretation Service at the OECD for ten years. A founding member of EMCI and of PAMCIT and a registered trainer with the OIF and AfIA (African Interpretation Academy), she has organized training for trainer workshops and training courses worldwide, with a particular emphasis on curriculum development and the specificities of interpreting into a B language. She is on the Editorial Board of several journals, including "Interpreting", "Forum" and "InContext".
Clare Donovan's research interests have evolved over the years. From an initial interest in the interpretation of stylistic elements, her experience as a trainer and practitioner has led her to focus on the sociology of the profession and aspects of interpreter training, including selection at entrance and at final exams, the role of recruiters and internships in training, interpreting into a B language, as well as the transition from training to workplace. This research has motivated her to introduce changes in interpreter training curricula at ESIT and elsewhere, with the use of sight translation as a bridge from consecutive to simultaneous, an emphasis on exposing students to professional conditions as early as possible and earlier, more systematic introduction of simultaneous into B.
Providing feedback in conference interpreter training
Provision of feedback to conference interpreting students during exercises is crucial. It is the moment when trainers can analyse the students' performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, provide advice as to how to build on strengths, and above all propose remedies to help eliminate any weaknesses. The quality of feedback will determine the success, or failure, of expertise transfer. It is therefore essential to get it right.
This presentation does not claim to contribute to translation or pedagogical theory, a task for which the author is not qualified. Rather, it attempts, in an empirical, practical way, to establish a kind of protocol for providing feedback, while stressing that the framework provided will be used flexibly.
To establish the protocol in question, three questions in particular are examined. First, who is to provide feedback (including self-assessment and peer feedback) and in which order should actors speak. Second, what issues should be covered by feedback. Third, how feedback is to be conveyed to students so as to achieve maximum acceptance and effectiveness.
Roderick Jones, Conference interpreter trainer
Roderick Jones pursued his higher education at Oxford University from 1977 to 1981, where he studied Modern Languages. Following his academic studies, he underwent specialized vocational training as a conference interpreter through the European Commission's in-house program between 1981 and 1982.
His distinguished professional career at the European Commission spanned from 1982 to 2019, during which he served as a staff conference interpreter. In this role, he worked actively with French and English, while maintaining a broad range of passive working languages, including German, Italian, Czech, and Slovak. His leadership within the institution was further highlighted by his tenure as the Head of the Czech Interpretation Unit from 2005 to 2017. In addition to his work as a practitioner, Jones has been a dedicated educator in the field since 1986, training conference interpreters both internally at the European Commission and at various external universities. He is also a recognized author, notably for his work "Conference Interpreting Explained," which was first published in 1998 with a second edition following in 2002.