Conference Interpreting - A Complete Course and Trainer's Guide

Robin SETTON is a conference interpreter, researcher, trainer and author, of dual French and British nationality. Born in 1949 and educated in the UK and France, he holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and postgraduate degrees in Conference Interpretation (ESIT, Paris III), Translation (ESIT, Paris III) Chinese Studies (Paris VII) and Linguistics (Paris V). He has been a practising conference interpreter since 1979 (AIIC since 1983), working between English and French, and from German and later from Chinese, in international organizations (including 16 years at the OECD), the private sector and the media, and an occasional film subtitler and translator of literary, economic or technical texts.

Since 1990 he has also been active as a part-time or full-time trainer of conference interpreters, both in university-based postgraduate programmes in Europe and Asia, including Paris (ESIT and ISIT), Geneva (ETI, now FTI), Taipei (as Director GITIS, Fujen University, designing the curriculum in 1990-1994), and Shanghai (GITIS), and as designer and teacher of in-house and specialized training courses and workshops (IMF, EU/SCIC, UNHCR, UK FCO, AIIC, etc.).

His main research interests include the pragmatics of cross-lingual communication (notably in a relevance theory framework), the theory and teaching of interpreting, and more generally, the relationship between cognition, culture and verbal communication. His published work (see attached list: most journal articles are now accessible on networks such as Academia, Kudos or Research Gate) covers cognitive, linguistic and cultural aspects of interpreting, and has notably explored ways of combining different methodologies to understand and model the interpreting process. Book-length publications (published by Benjamins) include a 1999 monograph on Simultaneous Interpretation and the comprehensive two-volume Conference Interpreting: A Complete Course and Trainer’s Guide, co-authored with Andrew Dawrant (2016).