About the speakers and the organizing committee:

Stefano Arduini is full professor of Linguistics at the University of Rome Link Campus and visiting professor of Linguistics, Rhetoric and Argumentation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Vatican City (Rome). He has taught Linguistics at the University of Urbino (Italy), at the University of International Studies of Rome, at the University of Modena (Italy) and, in Spain, Comparative Literature at the University of Alicante and at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. He is honorary professor of the Universidad Nacional San Marcos of Lima (Perù) where he was visiting professor in 2003. He is the president of the San Pellegrino Unicampus Foundation for Translation Studies. Among his publications: Prolegomenos a una teoría generál de las figuras, Murcia, Universidad de Murcia 2000; Metaphors, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2007; Paradoxes, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2011; Con gli occhi dell’altro. Tradurre, Milan, Jaca Book 2020 (Russian edition 2021,); Traduzioni in cerca di un originale. La Bibbia e i suoi traduttori, Milan, Jaca Book 2021; Translating concepts, Routledge, 2025 Translator of Juan de la Crux, he began with Qoheleth, the translation of the Five Megillot (Qoheleth, Ruth, Canticle of Songs, Lamentations, Esther).

Bojana Budimir is an Assistant Professor of Dutch Studies at the University of Belgrade, where she teaches translation and language acquisition. Her research interests include the sociology of translation, the digital mediation of literature, and the integration of artificial intelligence into translator training. She is an accredited literary translator from Dutch and Flemish into Serbian and a founding member of the PETRA-NED network for educators in literary translation. 

Roberta Fabbri is director of SSML San Pellegrino where she teaches General Linguistics and Translation Theory. She is also the Academic Coordinator for the postgraduate course in Literary Translation, "Tradurre la letteratura". Her areas of special interest and research are translation, Italian linguistics and cognitive grammar (field in which she was awarded a Phd). She has published (with Stefano Arduini) Che cos’è la linguistica cognitiva, Roma, Carocci, 2008 and other articles on Linguistics and on the education of translators. On behalf of Fusp, she took part in the European literary translation project PETRA-E and now she is board member of the European PETRA-E Network that succeeded the PETRA-E project.

Waltraud Kolb is Assistant Professor of Literary Translation at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. One recent focus of her research is on digital tools and machine translation in the literary field and literary translation and post-editing processes. She is also a professional translator and a member of the executive board of the Austrian Association of Literary Translators.

Duncan Large is Executive Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He is Professor of European Literature and Translation at UEA, having taught previously at the Universities of Oxford, Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Dublin (Trinity College) and Swansea. He also chairs the PETRA-E Network of European institutions dedicated to the education and training of literary translators. Duncan researches widely in modern German literature and thought (especially the work of Friedrich Nietzsche), in comparative literature and translation studies. He has authored and edited six books about Nietzsche and German philosophy; he has also published two Nietzsche translations with Oxford World’s Classics (Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo), and one translation from the French (Sarah Kofman’s Nietzsche and Metaphor). With Jacob Blakesley (Sapienza, Rome) he is Editor of the monograph series Routledge Studies in Literary Translation; with Alan D. Schrift and Adrian Del Caro he is General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford University Press). His latest book publications are the co-edited volumes Untranslatability: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2018) and Nietzsche’s "Ecce Homo" (de Gruyter, 2021).

Prof. Susan Pickford is head of the English unit at the FTI, University of Geneva, where her research focuses on translator history and sociology and the cultural economics of translatorship. Her recent publications include Professional Translators in Nineteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2025) and a chapter on the literary translation industry in the Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025). Her guide to literary translation as a workplace practice, Translating Books for Publication, is due out in Routledge’s Translation Practices Explained series in August 2026. She is also a longstanding translator, having published her first translation in 2001, and is also an active translation advocate and quality assessor for various national translation funding bodies. 

Andrew Rothwell is Emeritus Professor of French and Translation Studies at Swansea University. He has research interests in 19^th to 21^st century French literature, especially modern and contemporary poetry, computerised translation technology, and translation theory. He has published numerous literary translations into English, including of poetry and prose by Bernard Noël, Émile Zola’s novels Thérèse Raquin (1998) and La Joie de vivre (The Bright Side of Life, 2018), for Oxford World’s Classics, and two scenario-novels by film-maker Bruno Dumont, La Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) and Humanité (Humanity), both in 2001. His translation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière (The Captive), also for the World’s Classics series, is forthcoming in 2026 and he is currently working on two novels by Albert Camus, for the same publisher. Other recent publications include Translation Tools and Technologies (co-authored with Joss Moorkens, María Fernández Parra, Joanna Drugan and Frank Austermuehl) and Computer-Assisted Literary Translation (co-edited with Andy Way and Roy Youdale), both issued by Routledge in 2023.

Gea Schelhaas is the director of the ELV (Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation). On behalf of the ELV, she participates in the European PETRA-E network. After attaining her degree in Dutch Language and Literature from the University of Utrecht, her first job was as an editor at BulkBoek Publishing. From 1999 onwards she held several Communications positions at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of The Netherlands, in The Hague. Currently, she is working on a website about ‘The Hollandsche Lelie’ (The Dutch Lily) a magazine for young ladies that was issued from 1887 to 1933 (www.dehollandschelelie.nl). In addition, she is a board member of the 'Een boek voor jou' foundation, which gives children in asylum seeker centers a book with Dutch stories and poems in their own language as a welcome gift.

Melanie Strasser has a degree in Philosophy and in Translation Studies, both from the University of Vienna. The topic of her doctoral studies in Romance languages and literature, also at the University of Vienna, which included research stays in Brazil, Berlin, and the United States, was the relationship between translation and the trope of cannibalism. Her fields of research are Brazilian and Portuguese Literature, Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Translation Theory. She is a lecturer at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna and works as a freelance editor and translator.

Karlijn Waterman is senior policy officer at the Union for the Dutch Language (Nederlandse Taalunie). She is contact for Dutch Studies in North and South America, the Mediterranean Region and South Africa. She coordinates the policy program of the Union for the Dutch language for translation, which covers the support of teaching all types of translation in Dutch studies worldwide, monitoring the infrastructure for Dutch Language translation and the Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation. She is board member of the European PETRA-E Network on the education of literary translators, that succeeded the PETRA-E project. Previously she was secretary of the board of the Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation (ELV), and initiated in that capacity the European literary translation project PETRA-E.