Karen Bontempo

Karen Bontempo has 20 years experience as an Auslan (Australian Sign Language) interpreter, and has worked as an interpreter educator for 13 years. Karen is an examiner for the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) and is the convener of the NAATI Auslan/English Conference Interpreter accreditation test development team. She recently completed a 7-year term on the national board of the Australian Sign Language Interpreters’ Association (ASLIA National) and currently chairs their interpreter education committee. Karen is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University, where she is a member of the Sign Language Linguistics Group, the Applied Linguistics and Language in Education Group, and the Centre for Translation and Interpreting Research.

Brooke Macnamara

Brooke Macnamara has been an American Sign Language/English Interpreter (CI, CT, NIC Advanced) for 10 years and recently began graduate study at Princeton University. Her research is focused on understanding the cognitive constructs that serve as the underpinnings to simultaneous interpreting ability. She is interested in individual differences in cognitive abilities such as working memory capacity, intelligence, cognitive control, and performance monitoring to assess aptitude for skill acquisition and expertise in interpreting.

Jemina Napier

Jemina Napier gained her PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University, where she now manages the suite of Translation & Interpreting programs. She has 20 years experience in signed language interpreting and 13 years of teaching interpreters internationally. Jemina is an examiner for NAATI; she is the current President of ASLIA National, and former board member of the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters. Her major research interest is in the field of signed language interpreting, but her wider interests include effective translation and interpreting pedagogy, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. She is the Editor of the newly established International Journal of Interpreter Education.

Franz Pöchhacker

Franz Pöchhacker is Associate Professor of Interpreting Studies in the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. He holds Master’s degrees in conference interpreting from the University of Vienna and from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and has been working freelance as a conference and media interpreter since the late 1980s. Following his doctoral research on simultaneous conference interpreting, he has also worked on community-based interpreting in healthcare and asylum settings as well as on general issues of interpreting studies as a discipline. He has published numerous articles and several books and is co-editor of the journal Interpreting.

Alexandra Rosiers

Alexandra Rosiers studied Applied Linguistics at the Erasmus University College in Brussels. She obtained her master’s degree in translation in 2006 and continued her studies to obtain a master in interpreting (2007). Her working languages are Dutch, English and Danish. In February 2008 she started teaching in the aforementioned college (mainly proficiency courses and sight translation). In October 2008 she joined the interpreting research unit where she is particularly concerned with psycholinguistic analyses of interpreters’ and translators’ attitudinal profiles.

Mariachiara Russo

Mariachiara Russo graduated in Conference interpreting from the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT) of the University of Trieste in 1987 and is a freelance conference interpreter ever since. In 1993 she became Associate Professor at the SSLMIT of Trieste where she taught simultaneous and consecutive interpreting from Spanish into Italian. In 2001 she moved to the SSLMIT of the University of Bologna at Forlì where she also teaches Interpreting Theory. Since November 2005 she has been Director of the Post Graduate Degree Program in Conference Interpreting. She coordinated the EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus) project which is an on-line resource freely available at http://sslmitdev-online.sslmit.unibo.it/corpora/corpora.php. She is on the Scientific Board of "PUENTES. Hacia nuevas investigaciones en la mediación cultural" and "TRANS. Revista de Traductología". Main research fields: development of an aptitude test for simultaneous interpreting; effects of morpho-syntactic asymmetries from Spanish into Italian; simultaneous interpretation of films; directionality; corpus-based interpreting studies.

Heidi Salaets

Heidi Salaets is the coordinator of Master in Interpreting at Lessius University College (LUC) in Antwerp, trains both Masters in Interpreting and Conference Interpreters and is responsible for CAIT (Computer Assisted Interpreting Training). She also trains community interpreters at the institutional level and serves as assessor in the certification exams. Her most recent publication with Jan van Gucht focuses on the perception of the role of the community interpreting profession by the community interpreters. At present she is doing research on inter-rater reliability of the Flemish Government’s certification procedure for community translators and interpreters. Together with Sarka Timarova, she is currently involved in a research project on aptitude testing for conference interpreters.

Sherry Shaw

Sherry Shaw, Ed.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of North Florida., USA, and program coordinator of the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs in American Sign Language/English Interpreting. She has been an interpreter educator for 20 years and is actively engaged in research that explores similarities and differences between signed and spoken language interpreting students. Her primary research interest since 2002 has been collaborating with international partners to identify cognitive and personal characteristics that contribute to student success in learning the interpreting process. In addition to essential characteristics of interpreting students, Dr. Shaw has published in the areas of student support systems, service-learning in the Deaf community, transitioning from language acquisition to interpreting, and establishing international research ventures. She serves as an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Interpretation and is a reviewer for the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship.

Christopher Stone

Christopher Stone is postdoctoral researcher at University College London, within the ESRC funded Deafness Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre. He trained as a BSL/English interpreter at the Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol 1995-1997 and has since worked as an interpreter and trainer.

His PhD explored Deaf professionals rendering television news into British Sign Language. His research focusses on Deaf interpreters, the history of community interpreting, bilingualism and interpreter aptitude testing. He is the current Chair of the Association of Sign Language Interpreters for England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Šárka Timarová

Šárka Timarová works as a research assistant at Lessius University College (Antwerp, Belgium). She trained as a conference interpreter at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), and followed her studies with a postgraduate research training programme (DEA in Interpreting) and Continuing Education Certificate for Interpreter Trainers (EP bursary) at ETI (University of Geneva, Switzerland). She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in conference interpreting to be submitted to Charles University. She is specifically researching the involvement of working memory in simultaneous interpreting and the applicability of these findings to interpreter training.

Simon Van Rietvelde

Simon Van Rietvelde obtained his master's degree in interpreting at the Erasmus University College in Brussel in 2006. In 2007 he enrolled in an advanced linguistics course at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he concentrated on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics and its applications for foreign language education. In 2008, he started his PhD. Here he combines interpreting studies with cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. As a researcher, Simon is part of the Centre for Foreign Language Teaching (Erasmushogesschool Brussel) and AQUILANG (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).