A historic chapter in Israeli academia is drawing to a close: Bar-Ilan University's Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, founded in 1972, will shut down as an independent academic unit at the end of this school year. This means no Israeli institution will offer a translation degree or practicum certification in simultaneous and consecutive interpretation starting this fall.
The closure was approved by Bar-Ilan's Senate on May 12 and was disclosed Wednesday. The unit traces its lineage to an interpreting track launched at the Ramat Gan campus more than five decades ago, and over the years it produced hundreds of Israeli translators and interpreters working across diplomatic, literary, and commercial fields at home and abroad. In 2009, the department's staff were instrumental in providing simultaneous interpretation during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan Speech, which outlined his vision in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Faculty had attempted to reverse declining enrollment through uncompromising curriculum reform, but those efforts were ultimately overtaken by what was described as "the accelerated effects of artificial intelligence" on everyday life, Israel Hayom learned. The shift in how people communicate, and how translation is delivered, has narrowed demand for the kind of intensive professional training the department had built its reputation on.
While the program cease to exist for prospective students, Bar-Ilan's current cohort of master's and doctoral candidates in translation research will continue their work uninterrupted in other departments. Faculty leadership is also exploring the launch of a new research track inside a different academic framework, though officials have not yet made a final determination.
Internationally, similar pressures have weighed on translation programs, as neural machine-translation systems and large language models have reshaped the labor market, pushing many working translators into post-editing roles rather than full original translation.
