The Australian national association for the translating and interpreting profession, AUSIT, has been organising biennial conferences for the last decade. As they steadily grew in quality and importance, the time to share their proceedings with a global readership has arrived. For the first time, AUSIT is releasing in book format the proceedings of its latest conference, held in November 2010 with the slogan Synergise! Presentations from an international gathering of speakers are collected in this volume, grouped into five chapters and addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of cross-cultural communication, the training of future practitioners, and a wide range of specific circumstances influencing the day-to-day work of translators and interpreters - including the business side of managing a professional practice. The hallmark of the conference was the balance it achieved between academic interest and professional reality, between research and detailed practice, between theory and the exigencies of translators' and interpreters' lives. The synergies achieved were much more than the simple sum of the components.
About the Author: Annamaria Arnall, Bsc, BA, FAIIT, started translating into Hungarian in the last quarter of the last century, as a food technology graduate from the then Horticultural University of Budapest. Her knowledge of the Polish language was in great demand and soon she embarked on interpreting as well, learning the profession on the go, under the mentorship of some of the greatest practitioners of those days. After moving to the Antipodes, she completed a degree in linguistics and anthropology from the University of Western Australia. Annamaria spends her free time as a volunteer office bearer at the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators, and was involved in organising the 2010 Synergise! conference. Dr Uldis Ozolins (University of Western Sydney, Australia) is one of Australia's most published writers and researchers in translating and interpreting. He is co-author (with Adolfo Gentile and Mary Vasilakakos) of Liaison Interpreting (1996), author of Interpreting and Translating in Australia: Current Issues and International Comparisons (1998), co-author (with Marianne Bridge) of Sign Language Interpreting in Australia (1999), and co-editor (with Sandra Hale and Ludmila Stern) of Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting - A Shared Responsibility (2009). He has numerous articles in international journals on translating and interpreting, most recently Factors that determine the provision of Public Service Interpreting: Comparative perspectives on government motivation and language service implementation in the Journal of Specialised Translation, No. 14 (2010). He has also published on broader language policy issues.