Keynotes
The Organizing Committee is proud to announce the two Keynote speakers for the conference:
Özüm Arzık-Erzurumlu, PhD
Özüm Arzık-Erzurumlu is a full-time faculty member in the Program in Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Reimagining Conference Interpreting in the Age of AI (Routledge) and co-editor of the forthcoming special issue Paradoxes in Translation and Interpreting Technology in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Her publications have appeared in journals including Interpreting, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and Perspectives. She has delivered invited talks and conference presentations internationally, including at ATISA, AIIC USA, EST, and IATIS. Arzık-Erzurumlu is a professional accredited conference interpreter with Turkish (A), English (B), and Spanish (C). She has interpreted speeches by American presidents for major Turkish broadcasters since 2006 and has pursued her professional interpreting career for international organizations, political summits, and media broadcasts. She is a board member of ATISA and serves on the advisory boards of Encounters in Translation and the Journal of Translation Studies.
Reimagining Conference Interpreting: Technology, Technocuriosity, and Human Agency
Conference interpreting has been shaped by technological innovation throughout its history, from the introduction of simultaneous interpreting equipment to videoconferencing, remote interpreting, CAI tools, and, more recently, AI. Yet technological change has never been a one-way process; interpreters have continually negotiated, resisted, adapted to, and shaped the technologies they use.
Drawing on insights from Reimagining Conference Interpreting in the Age of AI and building on themes explored in 100 Years of Technology in Conference Interpreting, this keynote examines how the profession has evolved in response to rapid technological transformation. It explores the acceleration of remote interpreting, the ways interpreters adapted familiar practices to new environments, and the opportunities and challenges that emerged in the process. Particular attention is given to the profession’s gains and losses, highlighting how some interpreters moved from feeling constrained by technology to becoming empowered through it.
Viewing interpreting as a networked process involving both human and non-human actors, the presentation emphasizes interpreters’ agency and technocuriosity as drivers of professional change. Looking ahead, it argues that the future of conference interpreting will depend not only on technological innovation but also on the profession’s ability to preserve the social, emotional, ethical, and communicative dimensions that remain central to human-mediated multilingual communication.
Laura Keller, PhD
Laura Keller bridges multilingual communication and digital ethics. Her expertise in interpreting is rooted in an MA and a PhD in interpreting from the University of Geneva and her work as a freelance conference interpreter on the private and institutional markets in Geneva for going on 15 years. She is accredited to the European Institutions and is an active member of AIIC. Laura is currently pursuing an MA in Ethics at the University of Lucerne, specializing in the ethics of the digital transformation and is a supporting member of the Association of AI Ethicists. In her work in AI literacy advocacy she focuses on the ethical dimension of automatizing multilingual communication and the questions that arise regarding biases and power imbalances that are highlighted and exacerbated by AI-driven technologies. She has published and regularly intervenes in panels and workshops on the subject.
Is automatizing communication progress?
Technological advances are the contemporary epitome of progress. However, when priority is given to technical feasibility, questions relating to what is desirable and just may fail to be adequately addressed. When the kind of progress prioritized leaves no room for ethical deliberation, ethical safeguards are easily framed as obstacles to progress.
Using AI to automatize communication within and across languages is a prime example of the tension between technical feasibility and ethical considerations. Communication is ideally in service of relationship building and of negotiating a shared reality. Technologies that allow for scaling communication easily give the impression that they also automatically exponentiate underlying values such as inclusion. But addressing more stakeholders in more instances of communication over more channels and in more languages without engagement likely amounts to scaling without direction.
While it is illusory to believe that all ethical issues can be anticipated prior to the deployment of new technologies, positioning ethical deliberation as part of the innovation process may help resolve the perceived tension between progress and ethics. This is particularly relevant today, when the understanding of progress determines institutional and policy choices and drives resource allocation.
