20 March 2025 - online via GoTo Webinar
Confirmed speakers (with more to be announced)
Gwenydd Jones MCIL CL - Freelance translator, editor and writer
Gwenydd Jones is a freelance translator, editor and writer. She holds the DipTrans, an MA in translation studies and an MA in legal translation.
Gwen's training company, The Translator’s Studio, specialises in teaching the art of translation and helping translators prepare for the CIOL CertTrans and DipTrans exams.
You can follow her on LinkedIn and visit her YouTube channel.
Michael Lynas - UK Country Director, Duolingo
An experienced policy leader with track record of founding and growing impactful new ventures. Michael founded the National Citizen Service Trust, delivering an ambitious public policy idea by creating a new national institution enshrined in legislation and by Royal Charter that has created billions of pounds of social value by supporting 600,000 young people - building bridges across social divides and ladders to opportunity.
He has also worked for international management consultants Bain & Co and for UK Government as a Senior Policy Adviser at 10 Downing Street.
Zoe Moores - Researcher, trainer, lecturer and professional subtitler
Zoe Moores is a researcher, trainer, lecturer and professional subtitler. Her doctoral research at the University of Roehampton explored how respeaking could be introduced into the live event setting in the UK to broaden the access provided for both d/Deaf, deafened and hard of hearing audience members and the wider audience, and what additional skills and training would be required for those involved. She worked closely with the charity Stagetext to co-ordinate the project. Her work on the SMART project at the University of Surrey explored the provision of multilingual access through respeaking.
In her current position as Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, Zoe is part of the Action Translate team, exploring how machine-translated content can be used to support access to materials in humanitarian contexts, and during translator training. Zoe is a member of GALMA, the Galician Observatory for Media Access.
Norma Schifano PhD - Associate Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham
Norma Schifano is Associate Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in Romance comparative linguistics, with specific attention paid to linguistic minorities (specifically the Italo-Greek speakers of southern Italy), and migrant communities (specifically the Latinx population of the UK). Her research encompasses a variety of topics in formal morphosyntax, including verb movement (Verb Movement in Romance, Oxford University Press, 2018), with a particular focus placed upon the investigation of internal vs contact-induced linguistic change. Norma is also interested in ethical challenges and opportunities raised by collaborations between academics and third-sector organisations representing linguistic minorities.
Norma will share a presentation titled 'Crossing Borders: What Happens When Languages Meet' which explores the possible effects of language contact on the deep architecture of language. Through case studies of contact between unrelated varieties, such as Spanish with English and Italo-Romance with Greek, we will examine how contact can accelerate linguistic change and act as a catalyst for further developments, while also exploring instances where languages remain resistant to external influence in apparently surprising ways. Whether you're passionate about linguistics or curious about how languages influence one another, this talk will offer insights into the dynamics of language interaction and its implications for grammatical evolution.
Reserve your place and secure an 'early bird discount' by booking now via Eventbrite
