Translation Seminar Series (Since 2001)

Conference Interpreting at International Organisations

Date: 19/11/2024

Time: 05:00-07:00PM

Speaker: Dr. Lucía Ruiz Rosendo (University of Geneva)

Translation Seminar Series

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.

Tom, Dick and Harry as Well as Fido and Puss in Boots are Translators: The Implications of Biosemiotics for Translation Studies

Date: 17/10/2024

Time: 05:00-07:00PM

Speaker: Prof. Kobus Marais (University of the Free State)

Translation Seminar Series

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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.

Unfulfilled Hong Kong Dreams: The Works of Two Intercultural Dramatists – Augustine Mok and Danny Yung

Date: 06/03/2024

Time: 07:00-09:00PM

Speaker: Dr. Jessica Yeung (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Translation Seminar Series

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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.

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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?”.

一位《壇經》《道德經》漢藏翻譯者的經驗分享 

Date: 18/01/2024

Time: 4:00-6:00PM

Speaker: Khenpo Tsering Tashi 澤仁扎西 堪布

Translation Seminar Series

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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。

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

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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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.

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

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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”.

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

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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.

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

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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).

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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

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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).

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

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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.

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

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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.

Translator Ethics: From Cooperation to Risk and Trust

Date: 24/09/2020

Time: 5:00-7:00PM

Speaker: Professor Anthony Pym

Translation Seminar Series

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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.

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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

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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

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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。

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

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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.

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

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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.

Book Talk: Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation

Date: 18/04/2019

Time: 7:00-9:00PM

Speaker: Dr Harriet Hulme

Translation Seminar Series

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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

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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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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The internet is a new global space where exchanges take place on several topics and in many languages. Certain platforms provide opportunities for research in the shape of semi-organized data on literary and social contexts and access to possible far-located research populations.

The Value of Menggu mishi in Translation Studies

Date: 22/09/2016

Time: 7:00-9:00PM

Speaker: Professor Alatan

Translation Seminar Series

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本文通過分析《蒙古秘史》的內容特點、文本形式、版本流傳、語言特徵、翻譯歷史等要素,探討了這部蒙古族典籍的翻譯學價值,並提出宏觀譯學和微觀譯學概念,指出只有充分認識其譯學價值,才能使民族典籍的翻譯研究更加全面。

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