Book excerpt: The Australian national association for the translating and interpreting profession, AUSIT, has been organising biennial conferences for the last decade. As they steadily grew in quality and importance, the time to share their proceedings with a global readership has arrived. For the first time, AUSIT is releasing in book format the proceedings of its latest conference, held in November 2010 with the slogan “Synergise!” Presentations from an international gathering of speakers are collected in this volume, grouped into five chapters and addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of cross-cultural communication, the training of future practitioners, and a wide range of specific circumstances influencing the day-to-day work of translators and interpreters – including the business side of managing a professional practice. The hallmark of the conference was the balance it achieved between academic interest and professional reality, between research and detailed practice, between theory and the exigencies of translators’ and interpreters’ lives. The synergies achieved were much more than the simple sum of the components.