Author: Luis Perez Gonzalez

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3rd International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture

Online Research Training Event 26 June – 9 July 2023

The 3nd International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture, organized by the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), will take place from 26 June to 9 July 2023.

AFO member Prof. Luis Pérez-González has acted as Academic Director of SISU’s Media Research School since it was first launched in 2019.

The School aims to foster an open and wide-ranging take on media translation and digital culture, and to highlight the significance of both for and beyond translation studies. It encourages cross-fertilization between the two disciplinary sub-fields and addresses the new theoretical and methodological tools that translation scholars need in order to understand the strategic and catalyzing role played by translation in relation to a number of issues, including the following:

  • Reconfiguring the ecology of networked media – from mainstream news organizations to citizen journalism outlets; from printed written articles to multimodal assemblages; from professional reportage to amateur coverage of conflicts and natural disasters
  • (Re)producing shifting public discourses about cosmopolitanism, gender, nation, expertise, fandom or activism – among other core issues;
  • Developing more collaborative, participatory and deliberative processes of community formation, both online and on the ground;
  • Enabling disciplinary discourses and developments in the fields of multimodality, media sociology, cultural studies, journalism, globalization studies and critical theories of communication technology.

Like the highly successful 2021 edition, the 2023 edition will be run in virtual mode, using an advanced e-learning environment provided by SISU. This allows for the full range of activities normally included in the face-to-face delivery mode to be provided virtually, including teamwork and tutorials.

The featured theme for the third edition of the School is Translation and Sustainability in Media & Digital Culture. 

More information on the 2023 School’s programme and registration can be accessed here: https://www.sisubakercentre.org/media-school-2023/. 

Teaching staff delivering the 2023 edition of the School will include Luis Pérez-González (University of Agder), Mona Baker, Jonathan Evans, Henry Jones, Kyung Hye Kim and Neil Sadler.

Registration will open in March 2023.

More information on the School is available at: https://www.sisubakercentre.org/media-school/

Please circulate this information among doctoral students and early career researchers with relevant research interests.

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Webinar on the Business of Translation

On August 30, Anu Carnegie-Brown, Managing Director at Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd, held a webinar for students in the MA program in Translation and Professional Communication, ran by AFO members at the University of Agder.  During her webinar, Anu introduced students to the intricacies of today’s language services industry, not least the speed at which the global translation market is growing and changing.

Anu began with an overview of the different services that the language industry offers, ranging from translation to content creation. She proceeded to examine the relationships among the different vendors involved in the translation process and surveyed the various specializations that make up professional ecosystems in most language service providers. Lastly, Anu described the roles of reviser or project manager and explained how the execution of these roles is assessed. The last section of the webinar was particularly relevant to translation students considering their furture career prospects. 

Anu Carnegie-Brown, Managing Director at Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd
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Reception, Representation, and Representativeness in Translation

Professor Haidee Kotze (University of Utrecht) visited UiA on 16 August to present her research to AFO members, who were able to engage in depth with her work during the Q&A sessions that followed her presentations.

The first session reported on one of Professor Kotze and colleagues’ latest publications, where they investigate readers’ reception of literary work and underline the extent to which fluency, assimilation and invisibility are still predominant normative constructs in the literary translation landscape.  

In the second session, Professor Kotze provided insights on the controversy that erupted following the choice of translators for Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb around the world. The debate, which was prompted virtually in the Netherlands, resonated globally for shedding light on pressing issues concerning the representation of personal and collective experiential knowledge of minoritized groups. As extensively discussed in Professor Kotze’s Medium piece, such controversies might be deeply interwoven with the lack of equitable and diverse representativeness that characterizes the ‘rooms’ of the translation industry.

Professor Haidee Kotze (University of Utrecht)
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AFO Participation in the Founding Meeting of the Norwegian Association for Translation and Interpreting Research and the 2022 EST conference

In June, AFO members spent an eventful week in Oslo. On Tuesday 21 June they took part in the founding meeting of the  Norsk nettverk for oversettelses- og tolkeforskning (Norwegian Association for Translation and Interpreting Research). After more than a year of preparation that began with an online meeting in June 2021, translation scholars from more than ten Norwegian research institutions came together to bring the network officially into being. The network connects translation and interpreting academics from all over the country and aims to create new opportunities for exchange and collaboration on a number of pedagogical and research fronts.

Executive Committee of the Norwegian Association for Translation and Interpreting Research (from left to right): Siri Neraard (USN), Anlaug Ersland (Deputy Representative, UiA), Sandra Halverson (UiA), Randi Havnen (OsloMet), Guliano D´Amico (Deputy Representative, UiO)

The week proceeded with the 2022 EST Conference (Advancing Translation Studies), one of the biggest international events in translation studies, which held every third year. Three members of the research group took the opportunity to present their research. Erlend Wichne delivered a paper entitled ‘The Re-creation of the Foreign. The Gjendikting Concept and State-funded Literature in Norway”. Jean Nitzke and her former colleagues from the University of Mainz spoke about ‘Revisiting the Decision Tree Model for Post-editing Tasks: What Can the Language Industry Teach Us?’. And Sandra Halverson contributed to two presentations on site –– ‘Investigating Default Translation in Keylogs: Developing a Method’ with Claudia Förster Hegrenæs and ‘Building a Usage-based Theory of Translation: Foundations in and Developments from Descriptive Translation Studies’ with Haidee Kotze –– and to one online presentation entitled ‘Lexical Bundles in Formulaic Interpreting: A Corpus-based Descriptive Exploration” with Yang Li.

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Keynote talk at TRICKLET conference

Professor Sandra Halverson delivered a Keynote talk, entitled ‘Disciplinary Integration and the Critical Role of Sociocognition in Theorizing Translation’ at the 2022 TRICKLET Conference.

This event was held at Aachen, Germany, on 19-20 May under the title Model Building in Empirical Translation Studies, and was organized by the TRICKLET research group. In addition to a range of accepted talks on empirical and methodological topics, the keynote speakers engaged with a range of issues concerned with the state of Translation Studies as an empirical discipline.

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Contribution to Unsettling Translation

Professor Luis Pérez-González has contributed a chapter to Unsettling Translation, a volume of studies in honour of Theo Hermans that Mona Baker has edited for Routledge.

This collection engages with translation and interpreting from a diverse but complementary range of perspectives, in dialogue with the seminal work of Theo Hermans. A foundational figure in the field, Hermans’s scholarly engagement with translation spans several key areas, including history of translation, metaphor, norms, ethics, ideology, methodology, and the critical reconceptualization of the positioning of the translator and of translation itself as a social and hermeneutic practice. Those he has mentored or inspired through his lectures and pioneering publications over the years are now household names in the field, with many represented in this volume. They come together here both to critically re-examine translation as a social, political and conceptual site of negotiation and to celebrate his contributions to the field.

Professor Luis Pérez-González’s paper, entitled ‘Subtitling Disinformation Narratives around COVID-19. ‘Foreign’ Vlogging in the Construction of Digital Nationalism in Chinese Social Media’, can be accessed online via open access.

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Presentation at Ecology in Discourse

On 12 May, Professor Barbara J. Gawronska participated in a conference from the cross-disciplinary series Ecology in Discourse, which was held at the Pomeranian Academy in Słupsk, Poland.

Her presentation, ‘Ecology and folklore. Personifications of the forces of nature in Swedish feature films’ focused on Nordic mythological motifs in movies belonging to the category miljöfilmer (“ecological films”). 

This year’s conference edition was titled Natural and Cultural Landscape, and the participants were linguists, literature researchers, sociologists, and specialists in environmental studies. The contributions will be published in a peer-reviewed volume. 

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Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies

Professor Sandra Halverson and Álvaro Marín García have co-edited this collection published by Routledge. Contributors to the volume synthesize and critically reflect on epistemological challenges and developments within Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies, problematizing a range of issues. These critical essays provide a means of encouraging further development by grounding new theories, stances, and best practices.

This book will be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of translation and cognition, in such fields as translation studies, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, semiotics, and philosophy of science.

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Discussant in the ‘Chinese Cultures, Translation and Contemporaneity’ Forum

On 21 May, Professor Luis Pérez-González took part as an invited discussant in the Cinema Translation panel, as part of a three-day online event entitled Chinese Cultures, Translation and Contemporaneity: Literature – Cinema – Performance – Visual Arts.

The event, which took place between 20-22 May, was co-organised by the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Autralia).

© UiA 2024