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Year 2019. Geneva. At a time when technology still seemed distant from the profession of interpreting, I was a young scholar who dared to advocate for a paradigm shift in interpreting. In a panel on interpreter training, I reminded the interpreting academic community of its duty to prepare students and professionals not just for today…

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the intellectual and practical need to develop a Turing Test for Speech Translation to measure whether AI-driven interpreting systems have achieved high level performance in real-time language translation. The proposed test would be passed only when human judges can no longer distinguish whether a translation was produced by…

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have seen Large Language Models (LLMs) pass the famous Turing Test in conversational settings, marking a milestone in AI development. This achievement, demonstrated in some recent empirical studies, illustrates just how closely AI-driven dialogue systems have begun to mimic genuine human interactions. This should also serve as a reminder that…

Machine interpreting (MI), like any emerging technology, presents a range of ethical challenges that require careful consideration and governance (Cath, 2018; Floridi, 2021). Designed to enhance communication and understanding across language barriers, from everyday interactions to high-stakes scenarios, this technology has the potential to significantly impact diverse areas of human life. For this reason, its…

In the rapidly evolving approaches to academic work, where digital resources and artificial intelligence are transforming the way research is conducted, there remains a steadfast beacon of scholarly rigor in Interpreting Studies: the CIRIN Bulletin. Compiled biannually by Daniel Gile, one of the most esteemed figures in the discipline, the CIRIN Bulletin is far more…

This week, I had the privilege of moderating an interesting panel discussion on interpreter training and its future in the face of rapid technological change (video recording here). I was able to bring together experts from academia and industry, including: Carlo Eugeni, Winnie Heh, Giorgia Martina, and Dieter Runge. Each of them brought a unique…

It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then, it does. You come across something — an idea, a concept, a phrase — and it hits you like a lightning bolt. Suddenly, everything clicks. It could be a brand-new discovery, the articulation of an intuition you’ve long had, or the moment when a vague notion…

This was the question I asked myself when I first heard that this was technically possible. So, I had to try it out. I simply provided a link to something I know very well: my work, and watched the results emerge. Here are two podcasts generated by NotebookLM: The first is quite serious and is…