Aslı Alanat Kılıç

Aslı Alanat Kılıç holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public Administration and Political Science from Middle East Technical University and a Master’s degree in Conference Interpreting from Bilkent University. With a strong foundation in international affairs, she has developed expertise in diplomacy, global governance, and cross-cultural communication. Since 2009, she has been working as a conference interpreter specializing in French and English, with Turkish as her mother tongue. Her career spans high-level diplomatic meetings, bilateral negotiations, and multilateral summits, where she has facilitated communication for government bodies, international organizations, and private sector clients. As a member of TKTD (Conference Interpreters Association of Türkiye), she upholds the highest professional standards and actively contributes to the interpreting community, as well as training.

Yiğit Bener

Yiğit Bener has been working as a freelance conference interpreter since 1981. He is an accredited interpreter for the EU and the Council of Europe and has provided simultaneous and consecutive interpreting services at the highest level for over 40 years to national and international organizations. He has played a key role in the establishment and growth of Turkey’s national professional organization for conference interpreting, TKTD, as well as in AIIC, where he has also held administrative positions. Beyond his career in interpreting, Bener is a literary critic and writer. He has published six novels, five short story collections, four volumes of personal essays, and three children’s books. His works have also appeared in various anthologies. His novel Heyula’nın Dönüşü (the Return of the Heyula) was awarded the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize in 2012, while his short story collection Öteki Düşler (Other Dreams) received the Yunus Nadi Short Story Prize in 2018. He is also one of the founders and contributors to the online literary magazine İktidarsız. As a translator, Bener has rendered works by authors such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Julio Cortázar, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Marie Laclavetine, Albert Camus, Jean-Michel Casa, Agnès Michaux, Georges Brassens, Ernest Mandel, Samir Amin, and Michel Lequenne into Turkish. Additionally, he has translated numerous articles both into Turkish and French for various local and international journals. In 2002, he received the World Translation Prize for his translation of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. For his contributions to cultural and artistic relations between France and Turkey, Yiğit Bener was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2024.

Kutlay Bensan

Kutlay Bensan is a freelance consultant conference interpreter with 34 years of experience working with international organizations (UN, EU, NATO, IFIs), high-profile government meetings, and leading private sector companies. She specializes in finance, development, energy, agriculture, defense, NATO, EU affairs, and medicine. As the founding director of her company, she has managed complex multilingual translation and interpreting contracts, including RSI and long-term agreements with international organizations, IFIs, and the public and private sectors. Her expertise extends to business continuity. A strong advocate for education, she has been teaching conference interpreting since 1997. She has taught at Bilkent, Boğaziçi, and Hacettepe Universities and has been part of Bilkent University’s Master’s in Conference Interpreting program since its inception in 2008. She holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Interpreter Training (MAS) from the University of Geneva (2007) with a European Parliament scholarship and a BA in Translation and Interpretation from Boğaziçi University (1992). She has earned microcredentials from ITC-ILO Turin in Skills Development (2023), Skills for a Greener Future (2024), and Financing Skills Development (2024). Her academic interests include instructional design, skills development for green transition and digital transformation, and gifted education—particularly missed and dual diagnosis in gifted individuals. She is an alumni member of ITC-ILO Turin and a member of AIIC and TKTD.

Ebru Kanık

Ebru Kanık received her MA from Hacettepe University in Translation and Interpreting in Ankara. Ever since, she has worked as a freelance interpreter working for international organizations and bodies such as Council of Europe including the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), Monitoring Committee and the Commissioner for Human Rights; the European Parliament and the European Commission; EU Delegation to Turkey; United Nations and its Agencies such as UNDP, UNFPA, FAO, WHO, UNHCR, UNICEF and ILO; intergovernmental organizations such as IOM; the World Bank, IFC, EBRD and OECD; several national and international NGOs including ICRC, IFRC; Eurochambres; the Office of the President of Turkey, Ministries, the Turkish Grand National Assembly; Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey; EU Delegation to Turkey based in Ankara; several Embassies based in Ankara and private sector actors (national and international). She is an EU accredited interpreter, AIIC and TKTD member. She has extensive experience in meetings covering areas such as law (i.e. human rights, law, refugee law, patent law, alternative dispute resolution, arbitration, criminal and civil law), political and economic issues, finance, accounting, medicine, pharmaceuticals and other areas such as engineering, environment, agriculture and IT. She has also published on the translation of the American short story and on the topic of accessibility and communication.