Tuesday, May 17, 2016

362. NPIT3 and NPIT4



NPIT3 has passed into history. Alas, I was unable to attend, but echoes have reached me. I hear it was not an unmitigated success, because a sharp difference of approach arose between those who accept NPIT as a fact of life to be studied and taken advantage of, and those who consider it a bane to be cured with professional training and accreditation. More about this in later posts.

No arrangements have been made for publishing proceedings. It would be a great pity if the contributions (and the contributors?) were to vanish into oblivion, so for the record I've posted the programme of the conference on my Academia.edu page: click here or go to https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS. From it you can get an idea of which way the research is tending. Health care interpreting was well represented, but there were some notable gaps: for instance court interpreting and the translation of literary and scientific writings (see the recent post on this blog about Einstein's translator). It would be too limiting if NPIT were to be regarded only as a public service and community phenomenon.

The venue for NPIT4 in 2018 has already been announced. It's the Institute of Advanced Studies at Stellenbosch University (STIAS) in South Africa. We have to wait a little for the exact dates and the call for paper. The person in charge is Prof. Christine Anthonissen, Vice-Dean of Languages. Quite a change after three NPITs in Europe! Apart from the change of scenery and culture, it will hopefully encourage attendance from new regions and bring in more languages. Stellenbosch may sound a long way away for Europeans, but it's close to Cape Town, to which there are fairly reasonable air fares.

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Stellenbosch University.

3 comments:

  1. You missed some animation :-). I may have put myself on some black lists - I hope not. Thank you for the initiative on Academia. I would have loved to edit that volume, but for various reasons I just can't this time. But just to keep it on Academia is good. My own presentations weren't very interesting mostly because of my struggles with getting data, but there were other, very good ones. Talk to you soon, Elisabet

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  2. Rachele Antonini of Bologna-Forli, who started the NPIT conferences and was at NPIT3, coments as follows.

    As Elisabet wrote, the topics and themes addressed by the presenters at the conference were varied and a clear indication of the growing interest on NPIT and of the fact that previously unchartered areas of NPIT are now emerging as a study interest. At NPIT3 there was quite a strong bias on the professionalization of non-professional interpreters and translator which I think was a bit off the mark since it ended up steering the attention away from the need to study NPIT with an unbiased attitude.

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  3. For "coments" read "comments". More haste...

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