Translation Seminar Series (Since 2001)

This seminar explores the evolving landscape of translation in the age of AI, focusing on shifts in education, professional practice, and public perceptions. As technologies like machine and generative AI increasingly shape translation, enduring human skills remain central to the profession. While foundational research has identified essential competencies for translators, the rise of disruptive AI brings new challenges and opportunities for curricula and industry practices. Drawing on our recent research including feedback from students, graduates, industry, and government, this seminar addresses key questions: What do students and graduates expect? How can we prepare future translators to be ethical, creative, and adaptive leaders? And how can empirical evidence help shape education, industry standards, and professional practices?

This seminar discusses how subtitles—a common form of audiovisual translation—provide unique insights into multimodal language processing. Integrating visual, auditory, and textual information while watching subtitled videos is cognitively demanding, which requires coordination of different cognitive systems. Drawing on eye-tracking research, the talk presents empirical evidence on how viewers process subtitles, adapt their reading strategies to increasing demands, and how these behaviours differ between adults and children. The session highlights how research on subtitle reading can help us better understand the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing in digital and multimodal contexts.

In this seminar, Dr. Omid Tofighian explores collaborative translation and creative resistance with displaced and incarcerated people, analyzing literary, political, and philosophical dimensions to challenge border regimes and illuminate new forms of public philosophy.

In this seminar, Dr. Moorkens will introduce his proposal for a Triple Bottom Line for Translation Automation and Sustainability.

In this seminar, Prof. Neather tries to address museological research from the translation studies perspective by exploring how scientific narratives of extinction and climate change are translated in the museum context.

Dr. Curran will discuss how platformization and its underlying logic have facilitated the rise of a new category of language instructor who combines language and culture instruction with entertaining content and a distinctive self-brand: the platform language teacherpreneur (PLT)

Dr. Lucía Ruiz Rosendo will describe the characteristics of interpreting in international organisations, through a summary of the research carried out thus far, and drawing on her own experience as a researcher, conference interpreter trainer and interpreter at international organisations.

While investigating the Peircean definition of meaning as ‘the translation of a sign into another system of signs’, in particular the ways in which this kind of thinking has evolved in the modern field of biosemiotics, the speaker attempts to address the asymmetry both in the relationships between human and non-human animals and in the attention that translation studies pays to this power dynamic.

The speaker will discuss the respective visions for Hong Kong that the two dramatists – Augustine Mok and Danny Yung – have worked towards since the 1980s and the factors that have prevented their fulfilment in the 21st century.

As Australia is now seen as a country that has extensive infrastructure for community interpreting, the speaker seeks to provide answers to two questions: “How did community interpreting become so extensive in Australia?” and “What do we know about those who provide and who use community interpreting services?”.

講者為三藏教授師佛學博士堪布，將與參加者分享翻譯《六祖壇經》和《道德經》過程中的個人點滴和心路歷程。

Professor Setton will explore some of the challenges to human-compatible machine interpreting (MI), as acknowledged by its designers, through a view of linguistic communication from a different, more humanities-oriented branch of cognitive science, rooted in the observation of ordinary language: i.e., pragmatics, and in particular, relevance theory.

Dr. Ponomareva will focus on evaluating the presence of the translator in his or her work by looking at various book covers and the paratext of three translations of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1830s) into English. It will be shown that these translators had appointed themselves to offer their Onegin(s) to English-speaking audiences as, with various degrees of self-confidence, they were sure that they were famous enough to advertise their translations and to attract their prospective readers, sometimes even more then Pushkin himself.

Dr. Mak will explain why the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), one of the major Bible publishers and distributors in late Qing and Republican China, published its annotated edition of Proverbs in the Mandarin Union Version in the early 1930s, more than three decades after the NBSS became the first Bible society to publish annotated Chinese Gospels and Acts in the 1890s

Dr. Siu will offer insights into how financial translators can capitalize on state-of-the-art language applications in the era of generative AI.

Professor Hsieh will examine interpreters’ functions and ethical dilemmas in managing cross-cultural care, using data collected from provider-patient interactions and in-depth interviews.

In this presentation, the speaker will share with us the initial findings from his latest research project which investigates a new way of working with machine translation output, designed to help mitigate the “fluency trap”.

In this presentation, the speaker will draw on concepts in agency theory to understand better the factors that influence the ways in which translation services are procured and provided, and address the impact of extant and emergent developments specific to the translation industry.

Professor Oksana Dzera & Dr Taras Shmiher of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv will each give a talk: “Ukrainian Bible Translation: The Case of Resistance and Exile” (by Professor Oksana Dzera) and “Liturgical Translation as a Domain of Translation Studies” (by Dr Taras Shmiher).

Mr James Shea and Dr Dorothy Tse, the co-translators of the book Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong, will read and discuss selected poems of the Hong Kong poet, consider his use of wordplay, and explore the challenges and pleasures of rendering his poems in English.

In this presentation, the speaker will explore the nature of ELF and the potential pitfalls it harbours for interpreters. She will present insights from research looking into ELF in relation to interpreting and translation (ITELF) and discuss preliminary results from the CLINT (Cognitive Load in Interpreting and Translation) project that uses multiple methods to answer questions relating to whether or not ELF input actually impacts interpreters’ processing and performance.

In this presentation, the speaker will introduce an approach called machine translation in language teaching (MTILT), which evolved from translation in language teaching (TILT). The MTILT approach draws on the idea of professional translator training and applies it to foreign language teaching.

This talk is a general introduction to Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience: Theorization and application (Zhu 2021, Routledge).

In the countries that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disability (UN CRPD), access to information for people with disabilities has become an important issue. Depending on the different countries, Easy or Plain Language is the means of choice to improve the readability and comprehensibility of texts. The speaker will talk about her study on how the processing effort and textual quality of the language varieties vary with target groups’ demands.

The speaker will reveal, on the basis of authentic data examples from asylum interviews and legal judgments, how the co-construction of meaning, evidence and identities may amplify the asylum applicant’s vulnerability of voice.

The two speakers will present the research findings in their project designed to investigate metaphors about coronavirus as reflected in both English and Chinese texts published in the Hong Kong SAR.

Dr Yunfei Bai reconstructs a series of interreligious conversations that took place in 1945 at Mount Gongga between two Western journalists, George Henry Johnston (1912–1970) and James Cobb Burke (1915–1964), and various members of the Sino-Tibetan Buddhist community based at Mount Gongga. This encounter during the republican period may serve as a historical precedent for rethinking the protracted contacts between Tibetan Buddhism and other epistemological traditions in the present day.

Professor Kayoko Takeda will will discuss the issues of individual interpreters’ legal responsibility and ethical choices in unlawful or potentially unlawful acts. based on her research and new book “Interpreters and War Crimes” (Routledge).

Professor Brenda Nicodemus will explore the similarities and differences between spoken and signed language interpreting by discussing our respective histories, educational backgrounds, credentialing, and research.

Professor Alice Deignan will describe a project that used corpus linguistic techniques to examine texts on the topic of climate change from expert genres, such as policy reports and academic articles, and materials for school students.

This talk will seek to connect a restated ethics of cooperation with more recent models of risk management, trust, and behavior change, mostly with examples from COVID-19 communications.

No one could have foreseen the far-reaching and devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on international gatherings and the interpreting profession in early 2020. Suddenly, multilingual online meetings were the only way for international organizations to continue their work, and RSI became the principal source of work for thousands of interpreters.
Professor Olsen will introduce to you In this online seminar the recent history and development of remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) and more.

This talk applies the model of “Behavioral economics” to the translational decision-making that converts national literatures into world literature—but in expanded form, with “Humans” split into Masculine Humans, Feminine Humans, and Queers.

冷戰期間，香港和台灣都在美國的保護傘之下，位於圍堵共產中國的前緣。然而，事實上兩地都頗為依賴中國的翻譯。一方面，兩地譯者絕大多數為出生於中國的流亡知識份子，彼此關係密切，另一方面則是大量使用中國譯者的譯作。

This presentation explores a unique courtroom in the common-law jurisdiction. This uniqueness is particularly characterised by the use of English as the trial language in a predominantly Cantonese-speaking society and the presence of court participants who are proficient in both languages.

A number of approaches can be used to detect the presence of translation in Wikipedia: identifying the rare cases where its presence is documented, comparing extracts from different parallel articles or digging back into the articles’ history to discover the origin of translated text fragments.

In this talk I will discuss my recently published monograph, Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation (UCL Press, 2018). Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún.

Translation process research (TPR) has been said to be in need of being reembedded in a new conceptual and methodological framework (Muñoz ed. 2016). The main reason for this is that meaning has been found or claimed to be ‘4EA’: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and affective.

The old Italian adage “traduttore, traditore” does no justice to the valuable work of translators, especially literary translators. Rendering a literary text into another language is no easy task, and although there is general consensus that literature -particularly poetry- is best read in the original language, there are instances in which translations are necessary.

This talk will look at literary illustration as intersemiotic translation, as the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Roman Jakobson). Using as examples illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, it will ask, amongst other things, how beyond representing scenes and characters, illustrators have “translated” into their own sign system literary elements which have no immediate visual equivalent, such as the verbal nonsense games that characterise Carroll’s novel.

Tibetan director and fiction writer Pema Tseden’s films and fictions from The Silent Holy Stones 《靜靜的嘛呢石》to Tharlo 《塔洛》are acclaimed by scholars and critics to be rare moments which individuate Tibetan characters, rather than conceiving of the Tibetan people en masse as the ethnic and cultural Other of China.

This highly illustrated talk explores food in performance and food as performing art; the performative in cookery, its staging in the kitchen and at the table; exploring piquant analogies and correlations; the theatricality of food and food as a model for theatre, multisensory, processual and communal.

This seminar will focus on a central argument on the task of the translator as a diplomat, by drawing upon my ongoing experience as the series editor and chief translator of the Intellect China Library, a book series that publishes English translation of the latest Chinese scholarship of art and culture.

How can minority writers within China assert their own linguistic individualism whilst also writing in Chinese? Ethnic minority works which deal with local culture, including customs, rituals and traditional legends, can generally be divided into two groups: writing in standard Chinese, and works that are composed in native scripts.

Ethnography is one of the most commonly used research methodologies in the social sciences. It has also long been regarded as ‘the translation of cultures’ (Asad 1986). In this seminar, I shall discuss how ethnography can be used in TS research.

As the demand for professional translation and related services grows in our ever more interconnected world, universities are coming under pressure from different quarters to respond effectively. In this seminar, I shall outline a systematic approach to curricular design to take into account not only the requirements of the language service industry and the market, but also those of other essential stakeholders, in an attempt to offer a roadmap for localized and contextualized curricular design.

During the early Qing dynasty (17-18th century), the Jesuit Figurists, including Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Foucquet, and Joseph de Prémare, espoused the view that symbols, figures, numbers, terms, and Chinese characters embedded in the Chinese classics proved that the Chinese people had believed in the God of Christianity since antiquity.

In recent years，both Chinese literature and culture are “going global”, which initiated a new wave of “Introduction of Chinese Learning to the West”. In the present “going global” process, it is Chinese literature and culture that attracted world attention rather than Chinese academic scholarships.

Minority Translation Studies (MTS), the study of translation to and from minority languages, evolved out of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) in the 1980s, but nobody has proposed Moribund Translation Studies, the study of translation to and from moribund languages, i.e., languages with few native speakers, especially young native speakers.