Transforming Lives and Careers: Mastering Communication & Networking Skills for Career Success, with Keynote Speaker Dottie Li

In today’s globalized professional landscape, clear communication is the foundation of meaningful connection and career advancement. Drawing from extensive experience — from her roots as a broadcast journalist to her journey advising global leaders and founding TransPacific Communications — Dottie Li explores how refining one’s speaking voice, mastering cross-cultural nuances, and building intentional relationships can break down invisible barriers in the workplace. This session moves beyond basic language proficiency to focus on the art of Power Networking Across Cultures. Attendees will gain practical insights into unlocking their true speaking confidence, commanding any room with natural authority, and transforming brief interactions into powerful professional opportunities. 

Skills Training: Sight Translation, with Yuliya Speroff 

Sight translation is where many of the skills that distinguish excellent interpreters come together at once. It requires interpreters to read ahead, analyze meaning, make rapid linguistic decisions, and deliver a clear oral rendition — all while preserving accuracy, register, tone, and intent. Whether working with medical forms, court documents, school communications, or community resources, interpreters are often expected to perform this complex task with little preparation and under significant time pressure.

This interactive workshop is designed for practicing interpreters who want to strengthen, refresh, and refine their sight translation skills across healthcare, legal, educational, and community settings. Participants will explore practical techniques for improving reading comprehension under pressure, paraphrasing without altering meaning, maintaining appropriate register, reading ahead, managing emotionally charged content, and delivering smooth, confident renditions. Through hands-on exercises, guided practice, and collaborative discussion, participants will leave with concrete strategies they can immediately apply in their interpreting work.

Centering Language Justice in Community and Social Change Work, with Abi Ocampo Zapién

Language justice is more than interpretation or translation. It is a practice rooted in equity, belonging, and collective liberation. Many social justice spaces aim to build inclusive movements, yet English is often still centered in ways that unintentionally exclude linguistically diverse communities from leadership, decision making, and participation.

This interactive session explores how language oppression shows up in organizing, advocacy, education, and community engagement spaces. Participants will learn how language justice grew out of community movements, why heart language matters, and how communication practices can either reinforce or challenge systems of exclusion.

Through storytelling, reflection, and practical examples, participants will explore strategies for creating multilingual spaces where community members can fully participate in the language they feel most connected to. The session will also introduce practical tools for practicing language justice in meetings, trainings, events, and virtual spaces.

Promising Practices for Working with Interpreters, with Abi Ocampo Zapién

This session explores practical strategies for creating inclusive multilingual meetings and events. Participants will learn how to effectively collaborate with clients, prepare multilingual spaces, and apply language justice practices that support meaningful participation, access, and belonging for all attendees.

 The Four S.I.N.S. of Literary Translation, with Yasemin Alptekin

In translating a literary text, each source language presents unique intricacies and challenges as its content is transferred to a target language. While some translations read flawlessly, as if originally composed in the target language, others force the reader to struggle, making it difficult for an outsider — with no access to the source material — to appreciate the style or plot. In this presentation, the ‘sins’ are categorized into an acronym defining the key areas that less-than-acceptable translations need to address.

Back to Basics: Professional Habits That Help Interpreters Stand Out, with Andrew Belisle, Gabriela Muñoz Ravello & Wendy Maestracci

This session explores the professional habits that shape how interpreters are perceived by clients, colleagues, and institutions. In addition to strong language skills, interpreters are often judged by their communication, preparation, conduct on site, teamwork, professional visibility, and business practices. Through practical examples and discussion, participants will reflect on how these habits affect trust, reputation, and access to stronger professional opportunities.

The Best of Both Worlds: Breaking into Scholarly Translation, with Zakiya Hanafi

This presentation provides an overview of the opportunities offered in the scholarly translation market, some of the professional skills required to succeed, and a roadmap of the publication process, from receiving an offer to seeing a manuscript through production.

Pathway to Court Interpreting: A Roadmap to Court Interpreter Credentialing for Medical Interpreters, with Eunyoung Kim 

Many medical interpreters already possess strong language skills, knowledge in modes of interpreting, professionalism, and interpreting experience. Those skills will serve as a great foundation for experienced medical interpreters to consider adding court interpreting to their professional skills portfolio as a way to increase earning potential and widen their professional scope. However, court interpreting is a distinct profession with its own linguistic competency standard, ethical framework, specialized skills, rigorous exams, and credentialing process.

This session provides a practical roadmap for transitioning from healthcare to the courts. Participants will learn how the court setting differs from healthcare, understand credentialing pathways, become familiar with the written and oral examinations, and leave with a practical plan for the next step for success.

A guest speaker will appear to share a personal testimonial on how to transition to the court interpreting profession and how best to prepare for the exams.

  

Translation in the Humanitarian Sector, with Manuela Noske

The humanitarian sector depends on translation and interpretation, yet insights from this work are rarely shared because language support during crises is often temporary, improvised, and under-resourced. These challenges are intensified in last-mile communities that fall outside commercial markets for the T&I industry, leaving even basic linguistic tools unavailable. This presentation applies a human-centered design lens to the problem, beginning with a core question: What do people affected by humanitarian crises actually need to alleviate their suffering? While the sector has well-defined standards, the success of any intervention ultimately hinges on effective communication with affected communities. Translation alone is insufficient, as many community members are illiterate or lack the educational background to understand information, regardless of translation quality. Drawing on vivid field examples, I show how critical information can be conveyed visually in ways that are culturally sensitive and responsive to the needs of these communities.

Multilingual by Design - Producing Accessible Health Education Videos for LEP Patients: Process, Tools, and Lessons Learned, with Niytia Przewlocki

The Harborview Medical Center (HMC) Burn Unit partnered with EthnoMed.org to address a critical gap in discharge care: patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) were struggling to follow the complex, multi-step instructions for at-home burn wound care. To bridge this gap, HMC Burn Unit nurses developed a detailed instructional script, and EthnoMed created an accompanying video to guide patients through essential supplies and each step of care. The video was produced in house using accessible, low-cost equipment and affordable online editing tools, demonstrating that high-quality health education content does not require a large budget.

To advance health equity and language access, the burn care video series is now being translated into multiple languages. The videos are designed for use during patient appointments, as a supplement to discharge paperwork, and as a resource for global outreach efforts.

This presentation will walk attendees through the complete production process — from initial concept to multilingual distribution — and explore how translators and health education professionals can apply these methods to create culturally and linguistically responsive patient education materials. Click here for a link to the burn videos.

Who is Listening? Ambient AI, Patient Rights, and Equity in Clinical Care, with James Sherrell

As artificial intelligence tools become increasingly common in clinical settings, health systems are being asked to make rapid decisions about how these technologies should be used, explained, governed, and evaluated. This workshop will explore the use of AI tools in clinical care, including large language models and ambient scribe technology, with a focus on the risks and opportunities they create for refugee, immigrant, and migrant patients and the care teams who serve them.

Drawing from emerging work in large academic medical settings and collaborations with colleagues across institutions including the University of Washington, Stanford, Yale, and SUNY, the session will examine key questions related to patient consent, privacy, language access, documentation accuracy, clinical trust, bias, and transparency. Participants will be invited to consider how AI tools can support care teams while also identifying the safeguards needed to ensure that innovation does not outpace patient rights, community trust, or health equity.

UNSCRIPTED! An Improvisation Workshop on Language Beyond Words, with Gauri Shringarpure

The quiet power of “Yes-and…” transcends any and all language. Improvisation is about leaning in, making a choice, and adapting to a situation with trust and acceptance. While improvisational skills always serve well in any sticky situation on the job, this workshop is about taking a breather and just having fun with other language professionals over some introductory Improv games. No experience necessary — sign up if you’re curious, whether you’ve ever or never heard of Improv!

Pathways to Credentialing: An Academic Approach to Medical Interpreter Training, with Emily Sielen & Sharon Yedidia

Getting certified as a medical interpreter in Washington is a bit complicated. Join us to review the current pathways to state certification for spoken-language interpreters and learn about how the Spanish Medical Interpreting Program at Columbia Basin College prepares its students for national medical interpreting exams. Participants will walk away with a treasure trove of resources and ideas to help prepare for credentialing, no matter their working languages or the pathways they take!

Do the Right Thing! Ethical Decision-Making in Healthcare Interpreting, with Amanda Wheeler-Kay & Rodrigo Gaspar Barajas

Interpreters have historically been taught there are specific “dos and don’ts” to ethical reasoning. Yet real world encounters often place interpreters at the intersection of accuracy, harm prevention, power dynamics, and human dignity. Choosing the “right thing to do” in this context is hard!

In this interactive workshop, participants will consider how to preserve fidelity while exercising professional judgment, cultural awareness, and ethical responsibility (without violating standards). Participants will contrast a rules-based “dos and don’ts” approach with dynamic, context-based decision-making; and they will be introduced to a practical tool for evaluating ethical decisions: Demand-Control Schema (DC-S).

We will use the revised NCIHC 2025 Code of Ethics and the framework of Cultural Humility to explore four key ideas essential for navigating complex ethical scenarios: 1) interpreting is a practice profession, 2) there are multiple right ways to interpret, 3) the interpreter is an active participant, and 4) context-based decision-making versus rules-based decision making.