New Insights, Shared Purpose

Each year, The Together Conference creates space for sign language interpreters and translators to reflect on practice, engage with new ideas, and learn from one another. In 2027, our theme is New Insights, Shared Purpose.

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At the heart of interpreting and translation is a shared purpose: to support communication, improve access, and enable fuller participation across a wide range of settings and communities. Yet the way we understand and carry out that purpose is shaped by many factors, including training, professional culture, working context, lived experience, research, and the changing demands of the field. It is easy to work from what is familiar, but no single pathway, viewpoint, or body of knowledge can speak for the profession as a whole. Across countries, domains, languages, and communities, professionals are asking similar questions in different ways. This theme invites us to consider what we can learn when we engage seriously with those differences and remain open to fresh thinking from across the profession.

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New Insights, Shared Purpose encourages a conference programme that is open, thoughtful, and wide-ranging. It creates space for research, reflective practice, case studies, panel discussions, lived experience, and practical sessions that examine both the realities of professional work and the ideas that shape it. It welcomes contributions from practitioners, researchers, educators, Deaf professionals, translators, and interpreters working across different contexts. Alongside presentations grounded in day-to-day practice, the theme also invites academic and research-led submissions that explore new theories, models, frameworks, findings, and questions that may deepen understanding or contribute to stronger professional practice. Whether the focus is on specialist domains, cultural and linguistic difference, international perspectives, ethics, professional tensions, education, or changing expectations within the field, the theme asks what new insights may help us strengthen our shared purpose.

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Across the conference, we would welcome presentations that explore questions such as:

• How do different professional, linguistic, or cultural contexts shape practice?

• What can we learn from colleagues working in different settings, sectors, or countries?

• What happens when we question the assumptions that sit behind our understanding of good practice?

• What recent research offers insights that could support stronger decision-making, greater access, or improved professional understanding?

• Which perspectives are missing, overlooked, or underrepresented in current professional discussion?

• How can research, training, and lived experience be brought together in useful and meaningful ways?

• What new theories, models, or frameworks are emerging, and how might they inform interpreting and translation practice?

 

This theme is not about setting aside experience. It is about placing our own experience within a broader professional conversation and recognising that the profession grows through exchange, reflection, research, and a willingness to learn from others. By making space for wider perspectives, fresh thinking, and shared learning, New Insights, Shared Purpose aims to support a conference that feels relevant and worthwhile to practitioners, while also offering a strong and credible platform for academic and research-based contributions. Above all, it centres the common purpose that connects us across different roles and contexts: supporting communication, improving access, and contributing to better practice across the profession.

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The call for papers will open on the 5th of October 2026