July De Wilde holds an MA in Romance Languages and Literature from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium, 1998), an Advanced Master’s Degree in Development and Cooperation from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium, 2001), and an Advanced Master’s Degree in Mexican Culture and Literature from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico, 2003). She taught French language and culture at the International Center for Language and Culture of the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (2001–2003), worked as an assistant lecturer in Spanish from 2003 to 2013 (Plantijn Hogeschool Antwerp, Hogeschool Gent, Ghent University). From 2014 to 2017 she was a postdoctoral assistant in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, and from 2016 to 2017 she also served as an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Since 2017 she is a professor in the Spanish section of the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University.
She obtained her PhD in Linguistics and Literature (2011) at Ghent University with a doctoral dissertation on the translation of irony. She has also published on the translation of multilingualism in literature and on the intersections between narratology and translation. Since 2013, her research has focused on multilingualism in public service contexts and institutional discourse in multilingual settings.
Her current research centres on (intercultural) communication in migration and institutional contexts, with particular attention to communicative processes involving people in situations of precarity. She examines how professional practices, digital infrastructures, and communication technologies shape access, participation, identity, and belonging within public services and asylum reception systems. Her work engages critically with questions of mediation (e.g. professional and non-professional interpreters, in-house trained intercultural mediators, on-site and video-remote interpreting, multilingual apps and websites, and interpreting and translation technology), power, and professional responsibility, exploring how communicative environments can both enable and constrain social and participation.
