With an aim to promote the study of interpreting in Hong Kong and the greater China area, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) is launching a biennial conference with the title of “HKBU International Conference on Interpreting”.

For the first HKBU International Conference on Interpreting, we have chosen the theme of the “History of Interpreting” not only because it is a logical beginning, but also because the history of interpreting, along with the history of translation, has been one of the most rapidly progressing lines of research in the fields of interpreting studies and translation studies. This trend was clearly manifested in the First International Symposium on the History of Interpreting, held at Rikkyo University in Tokyo in May 2014 and in the publication of New Insights in the History of Interpreting (Takeda & Baigorri-Jalón, 2016), a collection of selected papers, mostly from the Rikkyo Symposium.

The first HKBU Conference, inspired by the successful Rikkyo Symposium, aims to further explore interpreting phenomena in history and examine the different roles interpreters have played in historical events, focusing in particular on “how the practice of interpreting has evolved to address the needs of different historical contexts, and how understanding interpreting history is relevant to interpreters and interpreting practices in the present” (Takeda & Baigorri-Jalón, 2016, p. VII).

Together with this first instalment of the conference, we also plan to hold a photo exhibition under the name of The Interpreter’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: Between History and Memory, curated by Prof. Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, historian and interpreting scholar, and Dr. Icíar Alonso-Araguás. Images from the last 100 years will be shown to connect important historical events with the role of interpreters as linguistic and cultural mediators. The exhibition has travelled to Tokyo (Japan), Graz (Austria), Brussels and Antwerp (Belgium), Forlì (Italy), Hildesheim (Germany), as well as different cities in Spain, and will be brought to the Chinese-speaking world for the first time.

Themes:

· Practices of interpreting in different cultures, historical periods and geographical or geopolitical regions

· Reception of interpreters in different cultures, historical periods and geographical or geopolitical regions

· Evolution of the norms, code of ethics, and social status of interpreters

· Methods and approaches in the research on the history of interpreting

· The relationship between historical research and interpreting practice

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Jesús BAIGORRI-JALÓN

(Associate Professor (Emeritus), Department of Translation and Interpretation, and Member of the Alfaqueque Interpretation Research Group, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain)

Professor Kayoko TAKEDA

(Professor, College of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan)

All presentations should be given in English. (In exceptional cases, the organizers may entertain requests for presenting in Putonghua, subject to arrangement of the necessary interpreting provision).

Length of presentations: 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion)

Submission of Proposals:

Deadline for submission of proposals (Extended): 30 November 2016

Notification of the decision by the programme committee: 15 December 2016

Submissions must include the following information (in English):

- name of author(s)

- affiliation

- email address

- abstract of 300-400 words

- 3-5 keywords

- short author biography of 50 to 100 words

There is no plan to publish the conference proceedings

Conference Website: http://tran.hkbu.edu.hk/interpreting_conf2017

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