Henry is a champion for the profession. A long time member of the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters (NZSTI), he is heavily involved in professional training and setting up of professional standards and guidelines. He has been instrumental in bringing together practitioners of Maori, English, and New Zealand Sign Language. He has also been an advisor to many government departments in relation to interpreting and translation policies, access and quality issues. In 2012, he was appointed by the Chief Justice of New Zealand as special advisor to the Cross Bench Committee.

An opinionated advocate of professional organisations and a strong believer in trans-national and multidisciplinary co-operation, Henry is a Past President of NZSTI and is the current President of the International Federation of Translators (FIT).

He is the first council member from New Zealand in FIT’s 60 year history. He was elected onto the FIT Council at the 2008 Shanghai Congress with the 4th highest vote, and onto the Executive Council and Vice-President at the 2011 San Francisco Congress. He is the 13th President of FIT and the first from New Zealand.

He is an active interpreting and translation educator locally, regionally and internationally. Henry has given Keynote addresses in major T&I conferences in Oceania, North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. He gave the keynote opening at this year’s JIAMCATT in Geneva.

In 2000 Dieter joined the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the EU, an EU Agency that provides translation services to other decentralised EU agencies. Here Dieter was initially responsible for language technology before he headed the Translation Support Department that provides technical, linguistic and organizational services to the Centre’s translators.

During his time at the Centre Dieter got involved in the interinstitutional cooperation between the language services of the EU that tries to identify synergies and cost savings by sharing working methods and IT tools. His most important contribution in this context was the management the IATE project for the creation of a single, interinstitutional terminology database. IATE has been used by EU terminologist since 2004 as a common platform for collaborative terminology work. Its public site – iate.europa.eu – was launched in 2007.

In 2014 Dieter returned to the European Commission as the Head of the Informatics Unit in the Directorate General for Translation (DGT). His unit develops and maintains workflow and language applications for the translators, support colleagues and managers of DGT. A number of language applications are, besides that, shared with other EU language services in the framework of interinstitutional cooperation. The hot topics for the IT unit in DGT are currently machine translation and the definition of a flexible and sustainable computer assisted translation environment.

Many people, including our colleagues, predict that the advancement of automated translation and ever more sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence will mean the end of translation and interpreting as professions. Despite an ever deepening crisis, with tumbling remuneration to individual practitioners, there is rapid proliferation of translation and interpreting training programmes around the world and LSPs are sold at astonishingly record sums. Does it sound familiar? In this keynote, to be delivered at the prestigious AsLing gathering in the heart of one of the major global finance hubs, the President of FIT will draw on the experience and learning from the 2007 global financial crisis and apply them towards rebalancing the power dynamics within and without this critically important profession, as well as developing strategies in the face of such disruption.

IT tools and translation have become, for better or worse, inseparable. Generally speaking, technological progress is producing more and niftier tools at an accelerated pace: what seemed impossible a few years ago is today available on even the dumbest smart phone. Still, the classical CAT tool paradigm and user interface has barely changed over the last 20 years. The underlying problems of data quality and integrity and are still around. And (some) translators maintain a rather strained relationship with the tools that are allegedly there to help them.The keynote will offer some thoughts on this situation from the perspective of a very big, but maybe not entirely a-typical, translation service.