AFO News

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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).

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Podcast on Translation as a Research Field

Listen to Professor Sandra Halverson and Erlend Wichne, doctoral research fellow affiliated to AFO, talk to Gunhild Kvåle, Vice-Dean for Research at UiA’s Faculty of Humanities and Education, about translation as a field of research.

This podcast, released on 20 April 2022, is part of the Collets Kafé Podcast Series, which features conversations with researchers from a range of disciplines at UiA’s Faculty of Humanities and Education.

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