Translation Practices at the Time of A.I.

As artificial intelligence's translating skills develop, is human translation getting obsolete? Or more important than ever? Can the two go hand-in-hand?

Three renowned, dynamic translators working between Italian and English will help us answer those questions, by sharing practices and dilemmas at this unprecedented time.

Silvia Pareschi, prolific and lauded Italian translator of many North American and British writers including Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Zadie Smith, and Junot Díaz, will join us from Italy.

Elena Di Giovanni, professor at the Università di Macerata and audiovisual translator, will share insights on audiovisual translation and her ongoing commitment to expanding accessibility to arts and culture.

Clarissa Clò, Director of Italian Studies at SDSU, will round up the panel with experiences on collective translation from Italian to English (recently of Italian writer Amir Issaa's work) alongside colleagues and students.

The panel will be in English, with conversation to follow in both Italian and English.

The event will be in person, with Pareschi and Di Giovanni joining us from Italy on Zoom. Audiences may choose to be in person or online.

For those joining us in person, caffé, fruit, and morning pastries will be served.

This is ICC's first hybrid event, in the hopes of reaching all our friends, near and far.

MORE ABOUT OUR PANELISTS:

Silvia Pareschi has been translating Anglo-American literature for over twenty-five years. She has translated, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Ernest Hemingway, Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, Rachel Cusk, Cormac McCarthy, Zadie Smith, Shirley Jackson, Junot Díaz, Sylvia Plath, E. L. Doctorow, Isaac B. Singer, Annie Proulx, and Jamaica Kincaid.

In 2019, she received the Classifica di Qualità award from la Lettura for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson, and in 2024 she was awarded the Pavese Career Prize. She has long been involved in exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and translation, participating in conferences and seminars on the subject.

She is the author of the short story collection I jeans di Bruce Springsteen e altri sogni americani (Giunti, 2016) and the essay Fra le righe. Il piacere di tradurre (Laterza, 2024).

Elena Di Giovanni is Full Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Macerata.

From 2016 to 2021, she was President of ESIST, the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation. In 2019, she was Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in 2024 she was Visiting Professor at City University of New York and in 2026 she will be a Visiting Researcher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with a project on the history of accessibility to the arts.

Over the past 20 years, she has given over 60 keynote lectures on media translation and accessibility all over the world and for 20 years she has been coordinator of large-scale accessibility projects throughout Italy, for international institutions such as Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Arena in Verona.

She has over 120 international publications on translation studies, audiovisual translation and accessibility and in 2024 she was awarded the international Jan Ivarsson Award for her invaluable contribution to the field of audiovisual translation and media accessibility. She is one of the founding members of the international Journal of Audiovisual Translation (JAT).

In 2025, accessibility projects coordinated by Elena Di Giovanni brought over 2,500 people with disabilities to theatres and museums across Italy.

Clarissa Clò is Professor and Director of the Italian Studies Program and Chair of the European Studies Department at San Diego State University. Her research interests include Italian and Italian American Studies, literature, film, music and popular culture. She has edited and co-translated Amir Issaa's This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip-Hop Memoir (SDSU Press, 2023), winner of the prestigious 2024 Flaiano International Award for Italian Studies - "Luca Attanasio". She is the recipient of the SDSU Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Faculty Contributions to the University for 2024-2025.

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