International Workshop on Interpreting Technologies

Bart Defrancq is an Associate Professor at Ghent University. Initially trained as a linguist, he brought his expertise in corpus linguistics to the field of translation and interpreting studies. He has published on various aspects of simultaneous and dialogue interpreting, focusing on cognitive load, interactional patterns and the use of technologies. With regard to interpreting technologies he was one of the first to experimentally test students’ interactions with a CAI tool, their performances and cognitive load in technology-supported simultaneous interpreting. Besides his institutional affiliation he is also the current president of CIUTI and member of the Speech Repository Steering Committee, and a member in various national exam juries for translators and interpreters.
A convention, in the sense of a meeting, is a gathering of individuals who meet at an arranged place and time in order to discuss or engage in some common interest.

Daniela Eichmeyer-Hell is a conference interpreter (MA) and certified speech-to-text interpreter since 2014 and currently working on her PhD thesis (Transcultural Communication, University of Vienna) on speech-to-text interpreting (STTI), explicitly on quality-oriented consideration of the different STTI techniques.
She is a practitioner of conference and speech-to-text interpreting, deputy chair of the Austrian speech-to-text interpreters' Association, chair of the Bavarian speech-to-text interpreters' Association, a researcher and lecturer for STTI at the University of Vienna, the University of Graz, bfi Tirol/Austria and Kombia/Germany and representing the German Association of speech-to-text interpreters at DIN and ISO since 2021.

From speech-to-text interpreting for deaf persons whose mother tongue is German Sign Language (DGS), she started to produce live texts in easy to understand German. This was the starting point of her investigation on "easy to understand" and finally brought her to simultaneous interpreting into "Leichte Sprache" (easy to understand German) and into Easy English. She has been organizing all the interpreting needs preparing and executing the Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023.
These include the 6 official Special Olympics languages plus German including the easy to understand varieties of German and English, Sign Language Interpreting and Speech-to-text Interpreting bridging almost all kinds of communication difficulties and achieving an utmost degree of integration and inclusion of all the parties involved.

Fardad a visionary entrepreneur in the communication technology field, Fardad has founded and placed two companies among the fastest growing businesses in America. In 2012, he was part of the design and roll-out a complete makeover of the United Nation's meeting facilities. He has also played a key supporting role as a high-end equipment provider to various iterations of the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings, and several European Institutions. In 2016. In 2017, Fardad founded KUDO, where his combination of 12,000 professional interpreters and a ground-breaking, AI-powered Speech Translator are leading global organizations into a world in which everyone can understand and be understood in their own language.

Pablo Romero Fresco is Senior Lecturer at Universidade de Vigo (Spain) and Honorary Professor of Translation and Filmmaking at the University of Roehampton (London, UK). He is the author of the books Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking (Routledge), Accessible Filmmaking (Routledge) and Creativity in Media Accessibility (Routledge, forthcoming). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Audiovisual Translation and is the leader of the research group GALMA, for which he is currently coordinating several international projects on media accessibility and providing consultancy services for institutions and companies such as the European Parliament or Netflix. Pablo is also a filmmaker. His first short documentary, Joining the Dots (2012), was used by Netflix as well as film schools around Europe to raise awareness about audio description. His first feature-length documentary, Where Memory Ends (2021), has been screened at the London Spanish Film Festival and the Seminci, in Spain.

Jan Niehues is a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology leading the “AI for Language Technologies” group. He received his doctoral degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2014 on the topic of “Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation”. He has conducted research at Carnegie Mellon University, LIMSI/CNRS and Maastricht University. His research has covered different aspects of machine translation and spoken language translation. He has been involved in several international projects on spoken language translation, e.g. the German-French Project Quaero, the EU H2020 project QT21, EU-Bridge and ELITR. Currently, he is one of the organizers of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT).

Susana Rodríguez, MA in conference interpreting, is co-founder and CEO of KUNVENO, an innovative start-up that develops real-time language technology solutions such as the collaborative platform SmarTerp&Me.
Susana is a member of the Technical Committee of AICE, the Spanish association of conference interpreters, and an independent researcher focused on the development of LT applied to conference interpreting. She is also an ISO expert in translation, interpreting and related technology and an expert in international R&D project management from the Technical University of Madrid - UPM and in blockchain strategy applied to business from the Oxford Saïd Business School.

Marcin Feder has a PhD in linguistics (English/Computer Assisted Translation). He worked for Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and then (in 2003) joined the EP as an in-house interpreter in the Polish booth. Later he became the Head of the PL Unit in DG LINC, and subsequently Head of the Interpreter Support and Training Unit and acting Head of the Multilingualism and Succession Planning Unit. Since 2019, Marcin is the Head of the Speech-to-text Unit in DG TRAD, which is developing on a live speech-to-text and machine translation tool that is able to automatically transcribe and translate parliamentary multilingual debates in real time. The ultimate goal is to provide an automatic transcription and translation service for parliamentary debates covering the 24 official languages used by the European Parliament.