Artificial Communication: AI and Interpreting
Date: 07/12/2023
Time: 05:00-07:00PM
Speaker: Professor Robin Setton (Interpreting Studies Scholar, France)
Translation Seminar Series
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.
My Appointment with Onegin: Charles Johnston, Douglas Hofstadter and Stanley Mitchell
Date: 06/11/2023
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Anna Ponomareva (UCL/Imperial College London)
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Annotations Still Matter: The National Bible Society of Scotland’s Annotated Proverbs in the Mandarin Union Version (1933)
Date: 25/10/2023
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Dr. George Kam Wah Mak (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Translation Seminar Series

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
Artificial Intelligence and Financial Translation
Date: 28/09/2023
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Siu Sai Cheong (The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong)
Translation Seminar Series
Conceptualizing Culture, Power, and Ethics in Interpreter-mediated Medical Encounters
Date: 11/05/2023
Time: 09:00-11:00AM
Speaker: Professor Elaine Hsieh (University of Minnesota)
Translation Seminar Series
Post-editing Machine Translation Output within a Speech-enabled CAT Tool: Findings from an Eye-tracking Study
Date: 20/04/2023
Time: 06:00-08:00PM
Speaker: Professor Dragoș Ciobanu (University of Vienna)
Translation Seminar Series
Information Economics and the Procurement of Translation Services
Date: 30/03/2023
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Dr Callum Walker (University of Leeds)
Translation Seminar Series
Bible and Liturgical Domains of Translation Studies: The Ukrainian Perspective
Date: 12/01/2023
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Professor Oksana Dzera & Dr Taras Shmiher (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv)
Translation Seminar Series
Table Magic: On Translating Yam Gong’s Poetry
Date: 17/11/2022
Time: 07:00-08:30PM
Speaker: Mr James Shea and Dr Dorothy Tse (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Translation Seminar Series
The Imaginary Invalid. Interpreters in Times of English as a Lingua Franca
Date: 20/10/2022
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Professor Michaela Albl-Mikasa (Zurich University of Applied Sciences)
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Machine Translation in Language Teaching (MTILT)
Date: 29/09/2022
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Professor Masaru Yamada (Rikkyo University)
Translation Seminar Series
Language, Knowledge, Experience – Studying Translation Positively
Date: 26/05/2022
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Professor Chunshen Zhu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen))
Translation Seminar Series
Evaluating the Quality of Easy and Plain German from an Addressee-oriented Perspective
Date: 28/04/2022
Time: 06:00-08:00PM
Speaker: Professor Silvia Hansen-Schirra (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany)
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Translating Refugees: Conducting Empirical Research on the Intersection of Language and Social Justice
Date: 09/12/2021
Time: 04:00-06:00PM
Speaker: Professor Katrijn Maryns (Ghent University, Belgium)
Translation Seminar Series
COVID-19 and Metaphor: A Bilingual Study of Pandemic Metaphor in Hong Kong Public Discourse
Date: 04/11/2021
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Miss Grace Leung and Professor Mark Shuttleworth
Translation Seminar Series
A Sino-Tibetan-Western Interfaith Dialogue at Mount Gongga 貢嘎山 in Western Sichuan in the Summer of 1945
Date: 30/09/2021
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Dr Yunfei Bai
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Interpreters’ Joint Responsibility in Crimes
Date: 24/06/2021
Time: 07:00-09:00PM
Speaker: Professor Kayoko Takeda
Translation Seminar Series
Brothers from Another Mother? Examining the Relationship between Signed Language and Spoken Language Interpreting
Date: 03/12/2020
Time: 10:00AM-12:00Noon
Speaker: Professor Brenda Nicodemus
Translation Seminar Series
Cross-genre Translation of Scientific Texts for Young People
Date: 05/11/2020
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Alice Deignan
Translation Seminar Series
Translator Ethics: From Cooperation to Risk and Trust
Date: 24/09/2020
Time: 5:00-7:00PM
Speaker: Professor Anthony Pym
Translation Seminar Series
The Global Shift to Virtual Multilingual Meetings and Remote Simultaneous Interpretation: A Seminal Event for the Interpreting Profession or a Flash in the Pan?
Date: 30/06/2020
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Barry Slaughter Olsen
Translation Seminar Series

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.
The Behavioral Economics of Translating World Literature: Translators as Econs, Humans, and Queers
Date: 03/06/2020
Time: 6:00-8:00PM
Speaker: Professor Douglas Robinson
Translation Seminar Series
冷戰下的翻譯:香港與台灣
Date: 30/03/2020
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Lai Tzu-yun
Translation Seminar Series
Common Law in an Uncommon Courtroom: Judicial Interpreting in Hong Kong
Date: 17/10/2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Eva Ng
Translation Seminar Series
Tracking the Framing of Political Figures across the Multilingual Wikipedia
Date: 19/09/2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Mark Shuttleworth
Translation Seminar Series
Book Talk: Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation
Date: 18/04/2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Harriet Hulme
Translation Seminar Series

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 and the New Construction of Meaning
Date: 28/03/2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
Translation Seminar Series
The Challenges of Translating English Classical Poetry into Spanish Verse
Date: 14/03/2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Santiago García-Castañón
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Illustration as Intersemiotic Translation: Visualising Nonsense
Date: 29/11/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Emer O'Sullivan
Translation Seminar Series

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.
The Afterlife of Pema Tseden’s Characters
Date: 01/11/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Pema Tseden, Lim Dae-geun and Maialen Marin-Lacarta
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Lost Suppers, Longing for Commensality – Food across Disciplines, Life across Cultures
Date: 22/10/2018
Time: 4:00-6:00PM
Speaker: Professor Richard Gough
Translation Seminar Series

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.
The Task of the Translator as a Diplomat: The Case of Intellect China Library
Date: 27/09/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Ms Hiu-Man Chan
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Translating the Dialect of the Tribe: Language and Identity in Sinophone Bai Writing
Date: 12/04/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Duncan Poupard
Translation Seminar Series

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.
(Digital) Ethnography and/in Translation Research
Date: 01/03/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Chuan Yu
Translation Seminar Series
A Systematic Approach to Designing Curricula for University Translator Education Programme
Date: 25/01/2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Dorothy Kelly
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Manifesting the Great Dao —The Jesuit Figurists and the Christianization of the Yijing and Daoist Classics
Date: 30/11/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Sophie Ling-Chia Wei
Translation Seminar Series

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.
The Mechanisms, Features and Challenges Facing Translating Chinese Academic Works
Date: 09/11/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Liu Junping
Translation Seminar Series
From Minority Translation Studies to Moribund Translation Studies: the Significance of Chinese-Seediq Translation in Taiwan in the Wake of the Indigenous Language Development Act
Date: 19/10/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr Darryl Sterk
Translation Seminar Series

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.
Language Services in the Era of Internet and Big Data
Date: 28/04/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Prof Chai Mingjiong
Translation Seminar Series

Internet and big data have put the spur on the development of today’s world at an unprecedented pace. The translation industry which traditionally relied mostly on the production of individual translators is now gradually being replaced by the well-organized modern translation teams operating under the present day production logistics.
Interpreting at the Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) as a Turning Point in the History of Conference Interpreting
Date: 16/03/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Prof Jesús Baigorri-Jalón
Translation Seminar Series

The decision made by WWII Allied powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France) to prosecute expeditiously Nazi suspected criminals required the use of a simultaneous interpreting system which had been patented by IBM after successful trials at the International Labour Office in Geneva in the late 1920s.
“Words, Words, Words”: Sinicizing Shakespeare
Date: 23/02/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Ching-Hsi Perng
Translation Seminar Series

Since he was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1856, in a book titled《大英國誌》(The History of England), Shakespeare has gained more and more popularity in the Chinese speaking world, until he becomes a household name. That popularity is achieved thanks to translation and transformation of his works in various forms.
After Hegemony(?) Subtitling Affective Intensities in the Digital Culture
Date: 19/01/2017
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Luis Pérez-González
Translation Seminar Series

Disciplinary discourses at the interface between translation studies and activism have been traditionally dominated by ‘structuralist’ perspectives (Pérez-González 2010). Activist translation has therefore tended to be conceptualised as a set of counter-hegemonic practices of mediation invariably associated with written texts, and undertaken by aggrieved constituencies clustered around essentialist categories of identity politics.
Speak In Translation, Speak Over Translation: The Case of Hong Kong Theatre
Date: 24/11/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Shelby Chan
Translation Seminar Series

Most stage performances of translated theatre “speak in” translation, as they inhabit the world of foreign plays and adopt it as a model for the people and the theatre. Other performances “speak over” translation, as they interpolate the ideas of the local people into the foreign plays, not only in Sinified adaptations but also in supposedly faithful translations.
(Open) Online Resources for Research
Date: 13/10/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Esther Torres
Translation Seminar Series
The Value of Menggu mishi in Translation Studies
Date: 22/09/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Alatan
Translation Seminar Series
Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children
Date: 21/04/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Marija Todorova
Translation Seminar Series

Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakić-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other”.
Translation and Popular Music
Date: 31/03/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Dr. Sebnem Susam-Saraeva
Translation Seminar Series

The seminar will focus on how the performance of popular music, as well as its reception, can be influenced and shaped by translation and other interlingual activities. It will first offer an overview of the phenomenon by discussing music’s various forms of materiality and the accompanying forms of translation.
The Translation and Contestation of Political and Scientific Concepts across Time and Space: A Corpus-Based Study
Date: 18/02/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Mona Baker
Translation Seminar Series

This seminar will report on a large, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Manchester in the UK and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project involves compiling large electronic corpora of ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, early Latin and Modern English to examine how central concepts in the humanities and sciences have been (re)translated into these three lingua francas, and how they have been interpreted and reinterpreted as they entered new cultural and temporal spaces.
A Critical History of Women’s Literary Translations of the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (1900-2000): Its Significance and Methods
Date: 21/01/2016
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Liu Zequan
Translation Seminar Series

Chinese women’s appearance on the scene of literary translation has been a long-acknowledged fact. The earliest written record of Chinese women’s translation can be traced back to 1898, and the first woman’s translation of western literature is Xue Shaowei’s (1900) rendition of the French writer Jules Gabriel Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in 80 Days), though via its Japanese version.
Cultural Consciousness and the English Translation of Chinese Classics
Date: 21/12/2015
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Speaker: Professor Luo Xuanmin
Translation Seminar Series