The Department of Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bologna is organising the Second Forlì International Workshop on Corpus-based Interpreting Studies and Applications on 8–10 May 2025 in Forlì, Italy, and online.
Background
The Forlì International Workshop series was launched in 2015 to stimulate the creation of interpreting corpora and corpus-based research projects. The first workshop gathered more than 100 scholars from around the world, resulting in a volume of state-of-the-art research (Russo et al. 2018) and a special issue (Bendazzoli et al. 2018). The tenth anniversary of the first workshop marks an opportune occasion to take stock of recent developments and chart new directions in light of corpora’s fundamental role in technological advancements.
Theme
Interpreting corpora serve as the descriptive foundation of research and the ground truth against which machine interpreting technologies are evaluated. Corpus-based interpreting studies, as envisaged by Shlesinger (1998), have developed into a highly productive line of inquiry with theoretical inputs from cognitive linguistics and sociology and methodological contributions from natural language processing, prosody research, and multimodality. Recently, large interpreting corpora have fuelled the deployment of machine interpreting technologies, together with deep learning algorithms that synthesise signing images and texts (e.g. Saunders et al. 2022). Amidst changing conceptual boundaries (Pöchhacker 2024), methodological developments, and technological landscape, a field-wide reflection on the role of corpora is necessary.
In this context, we view the Second Forlì International Workshop as an opportunity to bring together researchers who create, analyse, and use corpora to study interpreting and develop tools and applications for corpus-based research, computer-assisted interpreting, machine interpreting, automated interpreting quality assessment, pedagogy, and other related domains.
Keynote Speakers
Bart Defrancq, Ghent University
Bart Defrancq is an Associate Professor at Ghent University, where he coordinates the interpreting programmes and a research team on simultaneous conference interpreting and police interpreting. Bart Defrancq is the current president of CIUTI.
Ella Wehrmeyer, North-West University
Ella Wehrmeyer is an Associate Professor and Chair of Language Practice at the North-West University School of Languages, where she teaches translation and interpreting studies. She obtained her D. Litt. et Phil. from the University of South Africa (2013). By constructing the first sign language interpreting corpus, she explored why Deaf audiences did not understand the sign language interpreters on the TV news broadcasts. The author of numerous articles on corpus-driven sign language interpreting, she is also editor of Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics (2023, John Benjamins), and co-editor of African Perspectives on Literary Translation (2021, Routledge). Her current projects include the construction of the first South African Sign Language linguistics corpus (an under-described language), in order to enable further corpus-driven exploration of interpreting features.