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GUEST SPEAKERS

Learn from the experts!

These select speakers were chosen to contribute a high level of advanced learning, experience, and excellence.

Invited by the American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation

Wilhelm Weber is adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and has also taught in Geneva, Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Panama. He now teaches consecutive and simultaneous interpreting into French and German. He has worked in all sectors of the interpreting market (international organizations, including the United Nations and the European Union, foreign ministries, summits of heads of state and government, and conventions) in Europe, the U.S., Asia, and Latin America. He is also known as chief interpreter of 13 Olympic Games. He obtained a Master’s Degree in Conference Interpretation at the prestigious School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva/Switzerland, where he also taught from 1963 to 1978.

Presenting the following session: Keynote

Invited by the Chinese Language Division

Feng Chen is an in-house interpreter for the United Nations with 33 years of experience in interpreting/translation, particularly in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. Having interpreted at meetings and events, he counts among his clients the ministers and heads of state/government of nearly 200 countries, including four U.S. presidents, 10 British prime ministers, and Chinese leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. As a conference interpreter in Chinese, he has been invited to lecture/teach at many universities/colleges and has been a guest/visiting professor. He has also engaged in translation and revision. He has published a dozen works on many subjects, from history to poetry.

Presenting the following sessions: C-1 and C-2

Invited by the Educators Division

Anthony Pym is the president of the European Society for Translation Studies (2010-2016). He is a translator (Spanish, Catalan, French, and German into English), translator trainer (in Spain, the U.S., Austria, and South Africa), and translation scholar. He has written, co-authored, or edited 25 books in the general field of translation and intercultural studies.

Presenting the following sessions: ET-6 and ET-7

Invited by the French Language Division

Luc Labelle is a French translator who has worked for the Canadian Parliament and international organizations, notably the International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations. He is the author of a 930-page English-French dictionary entitled Les Mots pour le traduire, which is now in its fourth edition. He is currently a freelance translator and holds training seminars for translators.

Presenting the following sessions: F-1 and F-2

Invited by the German Language Division

Philip Boehm has translated over 30 novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. His nonfiction translations include A Woman in Berlin and Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. He has received numerous awards, including two ATA Ungar German Translation Awards as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He also works as a stage director and playwright: original plays include Alma en venta, Mixtitlan, and Return of the Bedbug. He is the founding artistic director of Upstream Theater in St. Louis, Missouri.

Presenting the following sessions: AST-11, G-3, and G-4

Invited by the Government Division

Lawrence Taber has over 35 years of experience in foreign language programs in the private and public sectors. He has served with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Language Program as a linguist and manager for more than 25 years. He has direct involvement in day-to-day operations, as well as long-term planning for the program. He has worked on investigations across multiple domains. As a manager, he has served as the Foreign Language Program’s representative to the FBI’s counterparts abroad. He is an active U.S. Air Force Reservist with more than 14 years of experience as a Russian linguist.

Presenting the following sessions: GOV-2 and GOV-3

Invited by the Interpreters Division

Robyn Dean has been a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter for over 25 years specializing in health care. She has over 20 publications, all of which focus on the theoretical and pedagogical frameworks used to advance the practice of community interpreters. She is currently an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is the lead instructor for the Institute’s postgraduate degree in health care interpreting. She also teaches courses for postgraduate degrees designed for sign language interpreters in Europe.

Presenting the following sessions: I-1, I-2, I-3, and I-4

Invited by the Italian Language Division

Francesco Urzì was a translator and reviser in the Italian Translation Unit of the European Parliament from 1982 to 2014. As part of his duties, he has dealt with terminology (especially financial) and computer-assisted translation technologies (for which he was unit coordinator). He published the first dictionary of collocations for the Italian language in 2009. He is the author of various articles on phraseology and translation-related linguistic topics. He speaks regularly on terminology, translation studies, and linguistics at universities, and has been visiting lecturer at the University of Geneva since May 2016.

Presenting the following sessions: IT-2 and IT-3

Invited by the Japanese Language Division

Jay Rubin is professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Harvard University and a translator of Haruki Murakami and other modern Japanese writers. He retired in 2006 and lives near Seattle, where he continues to write and translate. His novel, The Sun Gods, set in Seattle during the Second World War, was published in 2015. He is also known for his mini-treatise on the Japanese language, Making Sense of Japanese, along with a biographical literary analysis of Haruki Murakami.

Presenting the following sessions: J-1 and J-2

Invited by the Korean Language Division

Ray Valido is a translation project manager with the Office of Language Services at the U.S. Department of State. He is responsible for the division’s desktop publishing program. He has done the graphics work for several of the division’s translation projects on the Adobe platform in various languages and character sets. He is also often on the road providing onsite translation project management to clients at conferences in the U.S. and overseas. He has an M.A. in Spanish translation and localization management from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Presenting the following sessions: K-3 and K-4

Invited by the Literary Division

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer and translator of Russian literature. Previously, she worked as an academic, publishing books such as Wagner and Russia. Her work as a musicologist has informed her approach to translation. Her Anton Chekhov anthology, About Love and Other Stories, appeared in 2004, along with the biography Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. Her new translation of Anna Karenina was undertaken in conjunction with her biography of Leo Tolstoy. She is currently directing the Early Chekhov Translation Project for the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a U.K. charity for which she is trustee.

Presenting the following sessions: L-1 and L-3

Marian Schwartz is a freelance literary translator of Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova. She translated Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Tsar and has re-translated almost a dozen Russian classics, including Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Other recent publications include Andrei Gelasimov’s Rachel and Daria Wilke’s Playing a Part. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Presenting the following sessions: L-2 and L-3

Invited by the Language Technology Division

Alolita Sharma is a board director of the Unicode Consortium. She is also senior manager for internationalization architecture and engineering at PayPal for products supporting over 200 countries. Previously, she led internationalization, localization, and NLP engineering at Twitter. She also created the language engineering team at Wikipedia to build tools to support more than 300 languages. She actively contributes to open source language technology projects and internationalization standardization work groups. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and mentors new engineers (especially women) entering the software engineering field.

Presenting the following sessions: LT-3 and LT-4

Invited by the Medical Division

James Dickens is the senior public health advisor for the Office of Minority Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Regional Office, Office of the Secretary, Region VI in Dallas, Texas. He is a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). He was selected to participate as a clinical team member for the Afghanistan Health Initiative in Kabul, Afghanistan. He served as the officer in charge of the USPHS Commissioned Corps Ebola Response Team 2 (a 76 member inter-professional team) stationed at the Monrovia Medical Unit (MMU) in Monrovia, Liberia-West Africa, where he oversaw local MMU response efforts.

Presenting the following sessions: MED-8 and MED-9

Invited by the Portuguese Language Division

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and literary translator, with some 50 books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish, and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and nonfiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. He is a former chair of the Translators Association (the British translators’ union), the Society of Authors (the national writers’ union), and a past director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He speaks regularly about translation and literature on the radio, at conferences, and festivals all over the world.

Presenting the following sessions: P-6 and P-7

Invited by the Science & Technology Division

Carl Haber, an experimental physicist, is a senior scientist in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. While primarily a particle physicist with a focus on instrumentation development for high-energy colliders, he has also been involved in cultural preservation science since 2002. He and his colleagues have applied methods of precision optical metrology and data analysis to the restoration of early sound recordings. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has a PhD in physics from Columbia University.

Presenting the following sessions: ST-4 and ST-5

Invited by the Slavic Languages Division

Madeline Levine has been translating from Polish since employing rough translation as an instrument for textual understanding while working on her doctoral dissertation almost 50 years ago. Her published translations include four volumes of prose by Nobel Laureate Czesłąw Miłosz, short stories by Ida Fink (1988 PEN translation award), various shorter prose pieces, and a co-translated 700-line satirical poem. She taught Russian and Polish literature and a graduate seminar on translation theory and practice at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (retired 2010).

Presenting the following session: SL-6

Invited by the Spanish Language Division

Bertha Gutiérrez Rodilla is a professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research topics include scientific language, diachronic and synchronic studies of lexicography and medical terminology, the history of Spanish medicine, methodology of scientific work, and the teaching of medicine. She has published more than 100 book chapters and articles in national and international journals related to her research topics, as well as books in Spanish on medical terminology and the history of medicine. She has been a frequent conference speaker in Spain and overseas. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Salamanca, Spain.

Presenting the following sessions: S-1 and S-2

Invited by the Translation Company Division

Beth Pride is the president of BPE Global. She has over 25 year of experience in global trade and international logistics. She offers subject matter expertise in brokerage, import operations, export operations, and the development and maintenance of global supply chain security programs. She has extensive experience in establishing global trade organizations, developing global trade strategy, and defining and implementing global trade automation solutions. She has experience in export licensing applications and management, product control classification, standard operations procedure development, and the development of policies and procedures, including export management and compliance program design. She has given presentations at local colleges, universities, trade associations, and small business organizations.

Presenting the following sessions: LSC-5 and LSC-6