Annual Christmas Get Together on 6th December 2019, Irish Writers’ Centre, 6:30 pm

Christmas is getting closer and we hope to see many of you at our annual Christmas Get Together in the Irish Writers Centre on Friday 6th December.

As always, the get together starts at 6:30 pm and there will be mulled wine and other Christmas themed goodies to enjoy while you mingle and network with colleagues.

Panel discussion with European Commission translators and interpreters

For our ‘speaker slot’ this year, we have organised a special treat – a panel discussion with translators and interpreters from the European Commission, who will outline their career paths and discuss their current work.

This discussion, like our recent panel discussion on AGM day, will be chaired by Elaine Jennings and will include the following 4 panel members:

The panellists are:

• John McGartoll is from Dun Laoghaire and studied European Studies (with Italian and French) at Trinity College Dublin. After teaching English for a year in Italy and a couple of short jobs in Dublin, he has been working as a translator for the European Commission since 2004, first in Luxembourg and now in Brussels. He translates and revises mainly from Italian, Polish and French and very occasionally from Finnish. He is currently struggling to learn Dutch.
• Caoimhe Alliot-Stenson: After studying Applied Languages (French and Spanish) at the University of Limerick for four years, during which time she lived abroad at every given opportunity (nine months of co-op in Paris, six months of Erasmus in Almería and two summers in Barcelona and Valencia), Caoimhe Alliot-Stenson enrolled in the Masters in Translation Studies at DCU. The day after submitting her final project she was on a plane to Luxembourg to start her first job as a junior financial translator. After two years she was Head of the English Team, responsible for training and mentoring newcomers, and after another two she was Team Leader for the Translation Department, covering seven languages. Caoimhe started working for the European Commission in 2015, where she has been translating from French, Spanish and, more recently, German and Romanian.
• Audrey Ann Flynn has a BA in French and German from UCC and an MA in Translation Studies from DCU.  To improve her languages, she spent summers in Bavaria and in Lille and periods studying in Freiburg and at the Sorbonne.  Audrey’s career in translation started with a five-month terminology internship at the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions in Dublin in 2000. In 2001 she moved to Germany to work as a staff translator for SAP, one of Europe’s top tech firms, where she mainly translated user interface texts and software documentation. After four years, she moved to the European Commission as an in-house translator in 2005. Highlights of her experiences at the Commission include: getting to learn Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Finnish and Italian; being a member of selection panels for translator recruitment competitions; and heading up a web translation office on a secondment to Paris in 2008.
• Morag Neath is Deputy Head of the English Interpretation Unit at DG Interpretation, the European Commission’s interpreting service. She interprets from French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish into English.  In addition to her conference interpreting work, Morag is responsible for cooperation with English-speaking universities, the newcomers’ scheme and outreach in the UK and Ireland. She has extensive experience as chair and jury member of interinstitutional freelance accreditation selection panels and is also a regular external examiner at universities across Europe.
• Aisling Ní Chatháin is a graduate of NUI Galway’s MA in Conference Interpreting course. She now works as an interpreter with DG Interpretation, the European Commission’s interpreting service, mainly interpreting from French, German and Irish into English. She also interprets into Irish, and is involved with training schemes and pedagogical assistance for trainee and newly-qualified interpreters with Irish.

We look forward to seeing you there ! Places are limited, so please make sure you register early with Rosemary at: admin.itia@gmail.com