Lukasz Kaczmarek, senior lecturer in translation, delivers a presentation at the first TransLingua Conference.
London Met’s senior lecturer in Translation, Lukasz Kaczmarek, was invited to deliver a speech during The First International TransLingua Conference on 24 September 2015. The conference took place at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and attracted a number of world class scholars from across the globe. The two-day event focused on topical issues in linguistics and translation studies and featured key note speeches from renowned scholars such as Juliane House and John Kearns.
Lukasz's speech focused on the complex issue of community interpreter roles in professional practice. Presenting partial results of his research, Lukasz argued that, although perceptions of interpreters' roles are individual and subjective, it is possible to discern certain patterns. One of these is a very close correspondence between how participants view interpreters' roles and what participants wish to achieve. This means that participants of interpreter-mediated events tend to perceive interpreters as a means of achieving their conversational goals.
In his speech, Lukasz also discussed implications of his preliminary research results and called for a revisiting of current ethical frameworks for interpreters and accommodating the complexity of interpreter roles. The speech was met with the audience's recognition, with calls for professional practice to be more focussed on functional aspects of interpreting practice.
