American Translators Association Conference

This association was founded in 1959 and is now the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States with more than 11,000 members in 90 countries. One of its primary missions is to promote the professional development of translators and interpreters. Annually, the ATA organizes a conference, a four-day international event offering language professionals more than 150 continuing education sessions, seminars, and workshops. This poster presents a selection of the sessions that I attended, including a summary of some of the dilemma’s and questions that translators and interpreters face

Tamar’s Legacy: The Early Reception of Genesis 38

The story of Tamar and Judah is one of the Torah’s more morally complicated narratives. As such, interpreters throughout history, but specifically early Jewish interpreters, grappled with how to relay this story in their translations of the Hebrew Bible. Using the theories and methods of reception history, this study demonstrates how the translations these early interpreters produced shed light on the dynamic relationship between a text and those who interpret it. Examining both the Greek Septuagint and Aramaic Targumim, the study identifies places in the translations where hints of the socio-historical position and theological commitments of the translators and their communities are woven into the Greek and Aramaic versions of the text

Interpreting in Northern Ireland

This article examines how interpreter provision in Northern Ireland developed in a very different way from Ireland or indeed England, Scotland or Wales. In general terms, interpreter provision in Northern Ireland is very good in that interpreters are routinely provided for hospitals, social welfare, schools and of course police stations and courts. The majority of interpreters have undergone training, and instead of outsourcing interpreting services to a translation agency, the authorities have opted for an in-house service for health and social welfare, a social economy enterprise for legal interpreting and a community development organisation for other types of interpreting. Each organisation has a register of interpreters

Legal interpreters in the news in Ireland

This article consists of a review of court reports from national and provincial newspapers in Ireland from 2003 to 1st August 2010. The reports provide an insight into the attitudes of judges, lawyers and police officers to defendants who are not proficient in English. The issue of defendants’ proficiency in English is a recurrent one. Coverage suggests that interpreters are not always provided in police stations or in the courts and that some judges continue to allow friends and family members to act as interpreters. Meanwhile, some solicitors consistently request interpreters for their clients. Other salient issues are cost, interpreter competency and interpreter ethics

Open Programming Language Interpreters

Context: This paper presents the concept of open programming language interpreters and the implementation of a framework-level metaobject protocol (MOP) to support them. Inquiry: We address the problem of dynamic interpreter adaptation to tailor the interpreter's behavior on the task to be solved and to introduce new features to fulfill unforeseen requirements. Many languages provide a MOP that to some degree supports reflection. However, MOPs are typically language-specific, their reflective functionality is often restricted, and the adaptation and application logic are often mixed which hardens the understanding and maintenance of the source code. Our system overcomes these limitations. Approach: We designed and implemented a system to support open programming language interpreters. The prototype implementation is integrated in the Neverlang framework. The system exposes the structure, behavior and the runtime state of any Neverlang-based interpreter with the ability to modify it. Knowledge: Our system provides a complete control over interpreter's structure, behavior and its runtime state. The approach is applicable to every Neverlang-based interpreter. Adaptation code can potentially be reused across different language implementations. Grounding: Having a prototype implementation we focused on feasibility evaluation. The paper shows that our approach well addresses problems commonly found in the research literature. We have a demonstrative video and examples that illustrate our approach on dynamic software adaptation, aspect-oriented programming, debugging and context-aware interpreters. Importance: To our knowledge, our paper presents the first reflective approach targeting a general framework for language development. Our system provides full reflective support for free to any Neverlang-based interpreter. We are not aware of any prior application of open implementations to programming language interpreters in the sense defined in this paper. Rather than substituting other approaches, we believe our system can be used as a complementary technique in situations where other approaches present serious limitations

Variable elimination for building interpreters

In this paper, we build an interpreter by reusing host language functions instead of recoding mechanisms of function application that are already available in the host language (the language which is used to build the interpreter). In order to transform user-defined functions into host language functions we use combinatory logic : lambda-abstractions are transformed into a composition of combinators. We provide a mechanically checked proof that this step is correct for the call-by-value strategy with imperative features.Comment: 33 page

A Rewrite Framework for Language Definitions and for Generation of Efficient Interpreters

A rewrite logic semantic definitional framework for programming languages is introduced, called K, together with partially automated translations of K language definitions into rewriting logic and into C. The framework is exemplified by defining SILF, a simple imperative language with functions. The translation of K definitions into rewriting logic enables the use of the various analysis tools developed for rewrite logic specifications, while the translation into C allows for very efficient interpreters. A suite of tests show the performance of interpreters compiled from K definitions

Interpreting in Palliative Care: A Continuing Education Workshop

Offers a curriculum for a daylong course for interpreters about palliative care, including lesson plans, handouts, presentation slides, and videos

Interpreters and cultural mediators – different but complementary roles

This article considers the roles of medical interpreters and cultural mediators and proposes that the two should be seen as separate. In the last six years cultural mediators have been trained in Ireland not to be interpreters but to help immigrants from other countries to access and use healthcare services as well as mediating in situations of conflict between health service providers and patients. Meanwhile, interpreters have been hired to bridge the language gap. Codes of ethics for medical interpreters and competencies of cultural mediators are considered in order to clarify role boundaries and to explore similarities and differences between the two roles

Speculative Staging for Interpreter Optimization

Interpreters have a bad reputation for having lower performance than just-in-time compilers. We present a new way of building high performance interpreters that is particularly effective for executing dynamically typed programming languages. The key idea is to combine speculative staging of optimized interpreter instructions with a novel technique of incrementally and iteratively concerting them at run-time. This paper introduces the concepts behind deriving optimized instructions from existing interpreter instructions---incrementally peeling off layers of complexity. When compiling the interpreter, these optimized derivatives will be compiled along with the original interpreter instructions. Therefore, our technique is portable by construction since it leverages the existing compiler's backend. At run-time we use instruction substitution from the interpreter's original and expensive instructions to optimized instruction derivatives to speed up execution. Our technique unites high performance with the simplicity and portability of interpreters---we report that our optimization makes the CPython interpreter up to more than four times faster, where our interpreter closes the gap between and sometimes even outperforms PyPy's just-in-time compiler.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Uses CPython 3.2.3 and PyPy 1.