This Professional Studies program is offered for 0.2 PS CEUs at the little/none Content Knowledge Level. RID HQ is an approved RID CMP Sponsor for continuing education activities.

One day, a colleague who would later become one of my closest friends approached me after an assignment and asked a simple question: “How can I better support you as a trans interpreter?” I wasn’t stunned by her question, but rather by my lack of a prepared response. Since then, I’ve been compiling the tools to respond to anyone asking that question.

In a field that often centers the role of interpreter over the individual who occupies it, how do we balance the impact of our actions on the consumers with the impact on our colleagues? In this interactive workshop, we will explore common challenges during and surrounding assignments that affect trans and gender diverse interpreters. If you aren’t trans but want to know what support to offer, or if you are trans and want ideas of what to ask for, everyone is welcome to come develop a toolkit of actionable steps to respond to those challenges. This workshop is for everyone working, teaching, or studying in the interpreting field.

This Professional Studies program is offered for 0.2 PS CEUs at the little/none Content Knowledge Level. RID HQ is an approved RID CMP Sponsor for continuing education activities.

This session shares early insights from a national study on interpreter training and professional gaps, combining data from 2,000 respondents and 18 focus groups with statistical analyses and lived experiences. Dr. Wright presents actionable steps for innovation and policy reform, aligning with Deaf community needs for sustainable industry growth.

This Professional Studies program is offered for 0.2 PS-PPO CEUs at the little/none Content Knowledge Level. RID HQ is an approved RID CMP Sponsor for continuing education activities.

In the wake of the pandemic and high-profile discussions of social justice, mental health of both interpreting students and practitioners is a needed area of focus. Self-care is a topic that comes up frequently to help interpreters build resiliency. Yet self-care that is personal in nature has limited effectiveness. This workshop explores ways to tie self-care strategies to work to make systemic change so that the environments in which interpreters work is more conducive to healthy relationships between all of the people involved.

This Professional Studies program is offered for 0.4 PS CEUs at the little/none Content Knowledge Level. RID HQ is an approved RID CMP Sponsor for continuing education activities.

The meanings of words do not inherently reside within the words themselves, nor do they exist as pre-formed structures in the mind (Langacker, 2008). Instead, meaning is dynamically constructed during communication, created and interpreted as we engage in utterances. This presents particular challenges for interpreters and translators, who must render meaning between different languages. A key issue, which will be the focus of this workshop, is managing utterances with minimal forms and translating the corresponding conceptualization into another language—commonly referred to as "expanding the message."

The concept of Expansion, introduced by Lawrence (1995), has been widely adopted in sign language interpreting. However, the precise nature of what is being expanded remains unclear. Is it the linguistic forms, the semantic content, or the underlying conceptual structures? Furthermore, what Lawrence identifies as “expansion features” may be better understood as discourse features, given that monolingual users of ASL are not expanding their messages but rather employing the natural linguistic resources of their language. Lawrence herself notes that while ASL and English differ in form, they offer equivalent messages, with ASL utilizing spatial and visual features suited to its modality. Yet, the rationale for labeling these discourse features as “expansion” remains unresolved.

In Translation Studies, the term Explicitation refers to a translation technique in which the target text becomes more explicit than the source, often making implicit information more overt (Englund Dimitrova, 2005). However, the challenge lies in identifying what qualifies as implicit (Murtisari, 2016). Researchers typically look for forms in the target text that are not present in the source, but this approach often focuses more on surface-level changes than on underlying meaning. This form-centric focus in both translation and interpreting has led to the tendency to equate expansion with the mere addition of linguistic material, rather than considering changes in conceptualization. This emphasis on form, counting the number of “countable forms” added during translation, has shaped traditional accounts of expansion and explicitation.

This workshop will explore a more meaning-centered approach to managing situations where the source language does not explicitly state something yet still conveys a concept. The goal is to equip participants with tools to discern which aspects of the conceptual world can be carried into the target language and to evaluate whether this constitutes "expansion." Additionally, we will discuss how explicitation has become normalized as a near-universal strategy in both interpreting and translation.

Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this workshop will argue for a meaning-based understanding of expansion, which focuses on the content and construal of concepts evoked by language (Langacker, 2008; Halverson, 2007). By considering how conceptual meaning is construed differently in source and target languages, participants will gain a better understanding of shifts in meaning that do not necessarily expand the message but instead offer a different construal of the original meaning.