Translation Seminar Series

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.