SPEAKERS

Spyros Balesias

Spyros Balesias is a professional translator, who is specialised in legal and financial texts, with English, German and Greek as working languages. Since 2018, he is a member of the Board of the Panhellenic Association of Professional Translators, Graduates of the Ionian University (PEEMPIP) and, since 2020, Board Chairperson. He is an Ionian University doctoral candidate, currently working on his PhD thesis about the localisation of touristic content.

Livia Florensa

Livia Florensa is an industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience in the translation industry. She has held different positions in different companies, from in-house translator to Project Manager, Account Manager, Training and Production Director, and CEO. She also has been deeply involved in quality management. In 2012, she became one of the experts working for the technical committee 174, Spanish mirror committee of TC 37/SC 5 (Translation, interpreting and related technologies).

She has been involved in the development of ISO standards (such as ISO 17100) and was the architect and Project Leader of ISO 18587 (post-editing of machine translation output) which was published in 2017 and will now be revised.

Haris Ghinos

Vice President of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC); Project Leader at ISO TC37/SC5 for ISO 23155:2022 on Conference interpreting services. CEO of ELIT Language Services and the Athens Interpreting Hub (AIHub). Started as European Commission staff interpreter and has since covered more than 4,000 meetings at the highest level. Held managerial positions with US multinationals in the environmental sector as well as with advertising agencies and PCOs. Holds degrees in Physics, War Studies, International Politics and Finance.

Valentini Kalfadopoulou

Valentini Kalfadopoulou is a PhD Candidate in Ionian’s University’s Department of Foreign Languages, Translation & Interpreting. She serves on the board of the Panhellenic Association of Translators, heading the Continued Professional Development Programme, the Localization and Terminology workgroups. She serves on the Scientific Committee of the Greek Network for Terminology, and the ELOT TE21 Standards Committee on Language Services and Resources. She holds a postgraduate degree in Computational Linguistics from Athens University. She has been working as a language specialist for projects involving translation, editing, proofing, language quality and terminology extraction since 1997 and in 2004 she joined Oracle, where she is a senior language specialist and a member of the English terminology team.

Panagiotis G. Krimpas

Dr. Panagiotis G. Krimpas is Associate Professor of “Terminology, Translation and Legal Texts” at the Faculty of Classics and Humanities of the Democritus University of Thrace (Komotini, Greece). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Law and a doctor’s degree in Translation of Legal Terms in International Agreements, both from the Law School of the Democritus University of Thrace, as well as a Master’s degree in Terminology from the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). His research interests include translation, terminology, legal language, dialectology, historical linguistics, anthropological linguistics.

Eirini Kostopoulou

Eirini Kostopoulou is responsible for managing the operations of ORCO’s EU department. She is also the company’s Quality Manager, overseeing the implementation of ORCO’s Quality Management System according to ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 standards.

She counts 25 years in the language services business and joined ORCO in 1998. Throughout this time, she has taken up many different roles, starting her career as a translator and moving on to project management, quality management and finally to her current role of EU Operations Manager.

She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Greek Language and Literature from the Kapodistrian University of Athens and a Master’s Degree in Translation from the University of Surrey, UK.

John O’Shea

John has served as member of the Board of FIT Europe since 2017 and has been Chairperson since September 2021. He is a member of the European Commission's Language Industry Expert Group. Active member of the Panhellenic Association of Translators, he is a legal translator by profession and also conducts research into the importance / impacts of legal translation.

Mavina Pantazara

Mavina Pantazara is an Associate Professor of “Translation, terminology and language technology” at the Department of French Language and Literature in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research interests include contrastive study of French-Greek, computational linguistics, lexicography, terminology and translation. She is a member of the Executive Board of the Hellenic Society for Translation Studies, the vice president of the Hellenic Society for Terminology (ELETO), a member of ELETO’s General Scientific Council, a member of the Scientific Committee of the Hellenic Terminology Network (EDO), as well as the head of the ISO/TC 37 standardization committee for Greece (Technical Committee TE21 “Terminology – Language Resources” of the Hellenic Organization for Standardization).

Emmanouela Patiniotaki

Emmanouela Pataniotaki is an academic and a researcher in the field of Equal Linguistic and Sensory Access, with a PhD from Imperial College London and many years of experience in the Design of Holistically Accessible Environments. She is a lecturer at University College London, the founder of the accessibility services provider ATLAS E.P. and collaborates with educational and research institutions in Greece and abroad.

She has been involved in the provision of accessibility services and media since 2008 in theatre, cinema, concerts, television, live events and education. She is the author of the National Guide to Subtitling for Accessibility Purposes and recently announced the forthcoming launch of a research process for the localization of services providing Equal Linguistic and Sensory Access in Greece through ATLAS E.P.

Ingemar Strandvik

Ingemar Strandvik is one of three quality managers in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), where he formerly worked as a translator. He has a background in Sweden as authorized legal translator, court interpreter, lexicographer and university teacher in translation. Apart from degrees in Translation, Interpreting and Philology, he has a Master’s degree in European Law, specialised in transparency. He is currently active in different standardization projects, including as project leader for ISO 11669 on translation project management.