Christos Ellinides is the Director-General of the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) at the European Commission. He is also the Chairman of the Management Board of the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union, Chairman of the EMT Board (European Masters in Translation) and leading the language industry expert group of the European Commission (LIND).
He joined the Commission in 2006 as director for corporate digital solutions and services in the Directorate-General for Informatics and was appointed later to the post of Deputy Director-General in DGT. Prior to this, for more than two decades, Mr. Ellinides was responsible for the introduction and effective use of information and communication technologies in various organisations operating mainly in Europe.
His career has evolved through posts and assignments in varying industries, and he has acquired broad and extensive experience mostly in a management capacity, including the functions of both CEO and CIO. His profile is marked by advanced organisational, coordination, and managerial skills, coupled with profound expertise in IT system platforms, collaborative tools, and telecommunications. He has been instrumental in spearheading innovative corporate infrastructure solutions for the Commission's information systems and language technologies, and leveraging the latest technological advancements, including artificial intelligence.
He has delivered speeches, lectures and presentations on business, IT, and linguistic matters at international and pan-European level. He is an active member of several professional bodies and has been a director and board member in a number of organisations with substantial international exposure.
Christos is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), Chartered IT Professional (CITP) and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS). He holds an MSc in Business Systems Analysis and Design from the City University of London (UK) and a BSc in Business and Computing from the Nova University of Miami (USA).
Title: to be announced
Helena Moniz is the President of the European Association for Machine Translation (2021-). She is an International Speech Communication Board Member (coordinating Awards & Honors and assisting on Ethics, 2025-). She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures (2025). Helena is an Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon, where she teaches Computational Linguistics, Computer Assisted Translation, and Machine Translation Systems and Post-editing. She is the Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Center for Responsible AI (2023-) (https://centerforresponsible.ai), and the coordinator of the project Bridge AI (https://bridge-ai.eu). Since 2025, she is an integrated researcher at the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon and a researcher at INESC-ID. Former President of the International Association for Machine Translation (2023-2025).
Title: Dynamic Roles of Translators in AI ecosystems
Susan Bassnett is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. She was educated in Denmark, Portugal and Italy, acquiring various languages in childhood. She established postgraduate programmes in Comparative Literature and then in Translation Studies at the University of Warwick where she also served twice as Pro-Vice-Chancellor. She continues to lecture and run workshops around the world and her current research is on translation and memory. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Academia Europaea. In recent years she has acted as judge of a number of major literary prizes including the Times/Stephen Spender Poetry in Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin prize. She is also known for her journalism, translations and poetry.
Title: Where next for Translation Studies?
