Translation Seminar Series

Skills for AI Translation: Student Expectations, Professional Realities, and Public Perceptions

Date: 27/11/2025
Time: 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Speaker: Prof. Stephen Doherty and Dr. Jia Zhang (University of New South Wales)
Translation Seminar Series

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?

Beyond Translation: Using Subtitled Videos to Understand Multimodal Language Processing

Date: 23/10/2025
Time: 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Speaker: Prof. Sixin Liao (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Translation Seminar Series

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.

Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence

Date: 25/09/2025
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Omid Tofighian (University of New South Wales)
Translation Seminar Series

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.

Language Teaching in the Platform Age: The Discursive Construction of Language and Culture for Self-branding

Date: 16/01/2025
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Nate Ming Curran (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Translation Seminar Series

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)

Conference Interpreting at International Organisations

Date: 19/11/2024
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
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: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Prof. Kobus Marais (University of the Free State)
Translation Seminar Series

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.

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