International CFP: On-line Conference in Translation and Interpreting Studies, 21 October 2011

This looks like an interesting event, and is open to anyone, anywhere:

International On-line Conference in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Translation and Interpreting in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Practice and Research

Friday, 21th October 2011

Centre for Translation, Interpreting & Intercultural Studies, University of Salford, United Kingdom

The aim of the online conference is to bring together international postgraduates from within the various areas of Translation and Interpreting Studies and to give them the opportunity to present papers to their peers.

We are pleased to announce that the keynote speakers for this year’s conference will be:
Dr. Peter Sandrini, Department of Translation Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Professor Francesco Straniero Sergio, SSLMIT, University of Trieste, Italy

Two decades after the emergence of the World Wide Web, the profound changes that the Digital Age has brought into our lives are starting to become ever more apparent. Technology is transforming the way we communicate, work, research – even, some claim, the way we think. As the new media and infrastructure proliferate, research and practice in translation and interpretation and their manifold interconnections with the technical environment invite re-consideration from all quarters of this diverse field.
In fact, the relationship between language mediation – translating and interpreting - and technology has traditionally been close. Whether one agrees with the view that modern translation studies and the quest for machine translation were born in the same instant or not, technology shapes the way translation and interpreting are practised, researched and received, while the spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) depends on these activities as much as they depend on it.

This year's OCTIS conference is dedicated to this relationship and to the various angles and perspectives from which it can be investigated and interrogated, for example:

• The significance of technology for research in translation and interpreting studies, both as a research instrument (data collection, electronic corpora, linguistic analysis) and as an object of study proper
• The role of the information ecology, economy and infrastructure, such as social networks, in translation and interpreting processes, especially with view to collaborative technologies
• Technologies like multilingual video conferences and their impact on the practice of interpreting and the perception of interpreting services
• The impact of language resources and tools on the workplace, practice and evaluation of translators, on and beyond the human aided machine translation – machine-aided human translation continuum
• Describing and evaluating the changing role of technology in translation/interpreting from a socio-cultural and discursive perspective, e.g. with regard to gender, censorship or social impact
• The didactic implications of the growing influence of technology on the development, design and implementation of translating and interpreting curricula

Given the multi-faceted nature of the topic, we are looking forward to attracting these as well as many more differentiated views and varied contributions to translation and interpreting scholarship in today’s digital age.

We invite abstracts for papers to be submitted by Friday, 20th May 2011. Abstracts should be not more than 250 words and should be submitted online. Presentations will be allocated 15 minutes. Successful participants will be notified by Friday, 22nd July 2011.

For further information please see our conference website at http://virtual-doc.salford.ac.uk/octis/.