Professor Damien Chiaming Fan of the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation (GPTI) was recently elected as the Vice President of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) during the organization’s triennial assembly held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Founded in 1953, AIIC is the only global association for conference interpreters. It sets professional standards and ethical principles and promotes the working conditions and training guidelines that high quality interpreting require. The association has a strict admission procedure based on a peer review system. Candidates must be sponsored by at least three interpreters who have been AIIC members for at least five years. AIIC members are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics and its professional standards. Currently, there are about 3100 members worldwide, among which 120 have Chinese as a working language. There are nine AIIC members in Taiwan.

Professor Fan began working as a professional conference interpreter in 2004 and has been providing service to international organizations, government agencies, media firms, and multinational corporations. He came to NTU after receiving his doctorate degree from the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan Normal University in 2013. Since then, he has been twice awarded as an Outstanding Teaching Faculty member and was also invited to teach as a visiting professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from 2019 to 2020. Upon returning to Taiwan, Professor Fan began reforming GPTI’s interpreting curriculum.

Although he became a member of AIIC in 2014, Professor Fan has not actively participated in the association’s affairs. He only submitted his candidature after receiving an international phone call from and being persuaded by his professor back in graduate school. He hopes that in his three-year tenure, he can help promote the AIIC brand and raise awareness to the value of the conference interpreting profession.