This proposal is aligned with research path 1. Linguistics, Language Teaching and Translation and it is a follow-up to the I Seminar in Research on Conference Interpreting (October 2022), where we deepened in the aspects of ethics and new technologies in the field of CI.  The “II Seminar in Research on Conference Interpreting” will focus on specific research methods in CI and on the impact of AI in the interpreting activity. Invited speakers will present the latest research in this field. In order to make the activity more productive, participants will be invited to do readings beforehand to enable them to participate more actively in the academic debate. The language of the seminar will be English.

The Seminar is aimed primarily at students of the aforementioned doctoral programme, and also at M.U. students related to Translation and Interpreting who wish to orient their future towards research.

It will be organised and moderated by Ingrid Cáceres-Würsig and Elena Alcalde Peñalver, both members of the high-performance research group FITISPos. It is planned to last 6 hours and will take place on the 6^th, 30 October and 2^nd November 2023 (always at 10.00h) on a digital platform.

The II Seminar in Research on Conference Interpreting will focus on the following topics:

• 6 October (10.00). “Multimodality in Conference Interpreting Studies: Implications for Methodological Development and Design”. (Luis Pérez-González).  Technological advances over the last two decades have significantly widened the range of non-verbal semiotic resources that conference interpreters are routinely presented with. Although conference interpreting scholars have long foregrounded the impact of cognitive processing on interpreter performance, gauging the specific burden of (often screen-based) visual input on interpreters’ cognition remains a relatively underexplored research theme. This session will examine how multimodal theory is informing new research on multimodal processing in conference interpreting, focusing on the methodological implications of this development.
• 30 October: “Impact of AI in the interpreting activity”. (Jan Niehues) We will start with an overview on the different use cases and difficulties of speech translation and examine state-of-the-art methods to build speech translation system. Then we continue with reviewing the traditional approach of spoken language translation, a cascade of an automatic speech recognition system and a machine translation system. We will highlight the challenges when combining both systems. Especially, techniques to adapt the system to scenarios will be reviewed. Secondly, we will discuss end-to-end speech translation, which are currently a focus in research.
• 2^nd November:“The concept of the augmented interpreter in the interaction with CAI tools”. (Carlo Fantinuoli)

Prof. Luis Pérez-González (www.luisperezgonzalez.org) is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Agder (Norway). He has published widely on various areas of media translation and corpus-based translation studies. He is author of Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues (Routledge 2014); editor of the Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (2019) and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2021). Since 2019, he has been the Academic Director of the International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture organized by the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University.

Prof. Jan Niehues lectures 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).

Dr. Carlo Fantinuoli (University of Mainz, Germany) has studied conference interpreting and holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics. He has taught at the University of Innsbruck, at the Postgraduate Center of the University of Vienna and at the Karlshochschule International University. His career in NLP/AI started at Eurac Research. Today he is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Mainz and Head of Innovation at KUDO Inc. He is also the founder of InterpretBank, a CAI tool for professional interpreters, and a consultant on automatic speech recognition and speech translation for the institutions of the European Union.

On three different days (6, 30 October and 2^nd November 2023), invited speakers will present a conference on their topic and afterwards a discussion with participants will take place. Participants will receive readings to prepare themselves for the debate in English. The organisers will send invitations to join meet the online Seminar to all registered students.

Participants will receive a certification of attendance and will be graded with “Apto” or “No Apto”. For the grade “Apto” they will be required to participate actively in the discussion with the invited speakers demonstrating that they have read the readings.