Author: Laurence Ibrahim Aibo, NYCT member
From September 4 to 6, 2025, the FIT – International Federation of Translators – Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs held its World Congress in Geneva. Special thanks go to the New York Circle of Translators who supported me with a Charles M. Stern Autonomous Award. Here are some highlights of the sessions I attended.
Dorothea Baur’s plenary session prompted us with a series of questions: “What happens when we let machines speak for us?” or “What happens when translation is reduced to perception and prediction?” brilliantly pointing out the difference between machine output and meaning. For more on this topic and other ethical considerations, you can visit her website.
Lijun Fan and James Phillips laid out some of the WIPO’s translation strategies (with and/or without Machine Translation), based on criteria such as audience profile, types of languages, and reputational risk.
Pierrette Brouillon from Université de Genève shared insights from UNI-ACCESS, a fascinating plain language and sign language accessibility project (I had so many more questions regarding its brilliant sign language video concordancers, but we ran out of time!).
In a jam-packed room, a testimony to the interest of the audience, Sabrina Girletti (Université de Genève) and Marie-Aude Lefer (UC Louvain) shared the result of a survey about pricing methods (by the word or the hour according to the task at hand) and income satisfaction among Swiss and Belgian translators. Unsurprisingly, the survey laid out a growing lack of recognition, dropping rates, decreased workloads, and deteriorating working conditions. Their full report can be accessed here.
Professional associations, including ATP-Rio in Brazil, the Czech Association of Interpreters and Translators, and the ATA, shared their insights about new regulatory frameworks challenging the translation and interpreting professions under the guise of “administrative simplification.” The German Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer talked about the newly created position of a Director of Public Affairs to bring up the concerns of professional translators and interpreters among political circles.
Ana Guerberof Arenas reported on the INCREC project about the conceptualization of creativity (I still wonder in what extent creativity can be “measured.” Can art be measured? How can a painting be reflected in terms of statistics or on a spreadsheet?). For those interested in this topic, The Visible Art of Translation is the podcast series of the EU-funded INCREC project.
Last but not least, Marija Todorova challenged us to think beyond the current AI hype (are we over yet?), engaging us about the need for low-tech (read “trusted and trustworthy human”) equitable language representation for underserved languages in an increasingly digitalized world.
The last session I attended, led by Alan Melby, Steven Lank, Maarit Koponen, and Kirti Vashee, focused on the much-needed consumer protection labels currently being developed (hats off to a formidable group effort!). Among many other important things, I learned that, since September 1st, any MT translation is to be labeled as such in China. If you would like to participate in documenting MT errors that could have caused harm, here is the link to a risk survey https://lnkd.in/ed6zHqJ7.
My own presentation focused on the risks that an overuse of artificial translation tools poses to our translation skills in a corporate world keen on portraying translation as a series of discrete tasks and in a translation industry where translators have gradually lost most of their agency. It was my first time being interpreted and I have to say that, as an interpreter myself, this felt quite special (thank you, esteemed colleagues in the booths!).