Media School 2025

Structure and Organization

The 2025 International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture will consist of five taught modules:

    • Module 1 | Theoretical Approaches to Media Translation Research
    • Module 2 | Research Methods in Media Translation
    • Module 3 | Media Research Design & Dynamics
    • Module 4 | Featured Theme: Human and Artificial Intelligence in Media Translation
    • Module 5 | Academic Career Development

Each taught module encompasses three contact hours and six hours of guided reading. During the School, participants attend two interactive 90-minute sessions (from the same or different modules) every day. A detailed programme will be published in May.

The School also hosts a number of group tutorials, offering participants further opportunities to engage in more depth with a wide range of topics and discuss their own research with tutors and their peers. Each participant will have the opportunity to select and attend three group tutorials during the School.

On the final day, participants (in pathway 1) will present their work to fellow students and staff and receive oral feedback. The submission of written work after the summer is required to be awarded a completion certificate.

Programme

MODULE 1 | Theoretical Approaches to Media Translation Research

Session 1A | Neil Sadler
Political Theory, Media Translation and Disinformation

It has been widely accepted for many years that translation is a political activity. What exactly it means for an activity to be political, nonetheless, has tended to be taken for granted and has received little specific attention within translation studies. The wealth of theoretical work on politics and the political in other disciplines, meanwhile, has been largely neglected by translation studies scholars, leading to a lack of conceptual clarity and rigour. This session will introduce two highly influential strains of political theory: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s work on hegemony and Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics. In each case, we will explore how their ideas can help us in thinking about the political potential of translation both within and beyond the context of institutional politics. Particular areas of emphasis will be the establishment and maintenance of collective identities and translation’s potential for both enabling and silencing speech, understood as the most fundamental dimension of politics.

In empirical terms, the focus will be on the role of varied forms of translation within the practice of ‘disinformation’ – a set of strategic communication practices intended to produce political effects. More specifically, it will draw upon work conducted as part of the ongoing project (Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a translingual, discursive dynamic focused specifically on contemporary and historical disinformation practices in Russia. The session will equip attendees with a powerful set of tools for conceptualising the political dimensions of translation practice across a wide range of media contexts.

Session 1B | Henry Jones
Theorizing the Materiality of Media Translation

Theories of materiality bring into focus the profusion of ‘things’ – that is, “entit[ies] with a physical-chemical composition” (Schatzki 2019:53) – that have a bearing on social practices: from material infrastructures (e.g. energy supply networks, the Internet), to the manifold devices that are directly manipulated in any given activity (including both hardware and software) and even to the human body. Scholars applying this conceptual lens typically seek to gain a deeper understanding of the social world by exploring how social activities both shape and are shaped by the material entities involved. Indeed, in translation studies, this theoretical lens has already helped shed light on the extent to which the histories of translating and of technology are inextricably intertwined, and in particular how the affordances of the ever-changing set of tools used to create, store and distribute source and target texts have contributed to the emergence, persistence and evolution of specific translation practices over time (Littau 2016a; 2016b; Jones 2018; Olohan 2021). There remains, however, ample scope and need for critical investigations of the relationship between human and non-human agents involved in translation, especially in today’s context where increasingly sophisticated AI systems are rapidly being integrated at various stages of the translation process.

With this research gap in mind, this session will introduce participants to key concepts and approaches which have proven productive as means of understanding the material dimensions of the social world – and specifically with reference to explorations of the materiality of media translation and digital culture. This theoretical discussion will be illustrated throughout with examples drawn from studies of fansubbing, Wikipedia translation and video games localisation.

MODULE 2 | Research Methods in Media Translation

Session 2A | Jonathan Evans
Incorporating AI into Practice-based Research in Media Translation

Practice-led research often takes the form of creative practice combined with critical reflection on that practice. Many students’ first experience of researching translation, at BA and MA level, will take the form of a practical translation and commentary, a form of practice-led research. However, practice-led research can also include action research and autoethnography, among other methods. There is a long tradition of scholarly reflection on translation by translators themselves, particularly in the literary field, though media translation in its varied forms also offers similar opportunities for reflective practice.

However, this tradition is problematised by the existence of free-to-use machine translation engines, such as Google Translate or DeepL, and the ongoing increase in machine translation usage in the profession. The traditional translation and commentary, which assessed not just translation competence and analytical skill, but also language skills, needs to be rethought as it is increasingly easy to use machine translation to prepare a draft.

In this interactive session, we will examine how artificial intelligence can be incorporated into practice-led research at the level of process in media translation. Drawing from translator-scholars such as Clive Scott (2000) as well as autoethnographic (Marinetti and Rose 2013) and action research approaches, it will explore how approaches that move beyond textual analysis by examining translators’ own experiences and perceptions can incorporate AI into translation processes without losing critical thinking. Following Scott, it will question the presupposition that the target reader cannot already read the source text given the near ubiquity of machine translation and ask how this might change translation practice. We will examine how to design such projects and how they might differ from existing work.

Session 2B | Henry Jones
Netnography: Researching Online Translation Communities in the Age of AI

Over the past decade, netnography (also known as virtual ethnography) has emerged as a key research method for studying digital culture, including the collaborative activities of geographically dispersed groups of non-professional translators active online (Yu 2019; Zhang and Zheng 2023). Pioneered by Hine (2000) and Kozinets (2020), the netnographic approach involves the researcher engaging with such virtual communities as a ‘participant-observer’, actively involving themselves in the daily activities of the group and interacting directly with its members over an extended period of time. The data generated through this method can take many forms, but the researcher’s own fieldnotes and interviews often take centre stage. As in more traditional (offline) forms of ethnography, the netnographer’s close proximity to their object of study typically allows unparalleled qualitative insight to be gained into community dynamics, motivations and experiences.

In this session, we will explore together some recent applications of the netnographic method within media translation studies and reflect critically on both the potential of this approach and its many practical and ethical challenges. In particular, we will consider issues related to access, privacy, generalizability and subjectivity, as well as tried-and-tested strategies for minimising such risks. In a final section, we will further investigate how netnographic methods are evolving in reaction to new technological realities and especially to recent developments in artificial intelligence (Kozinets 2020; Kozinets & Gretzel 2023).

MODULE 3 | Media Research Design and Dynamics

Session 3A | Neil Sadler
Research Design in Fluid and Unpredictable Social Media Contexts

Social media platforms continue to grow in importance and are both hugely important to many aspects of everyday life and the site of extensive and diverse translation practices. Studying social media data, however, presents considerable challenges for research design. Some are conceptual – what social media data can and cannot tell us and what wider inferences can be drawn from the data they can provide. Many others, on the other hand, are practical. Platforms differ significantly in their affordances and how they are used by their users. Platforms are often designed in ways that make acquiring data useful for research difficult. Making effective use of platform APIs to automatically download data can require significant investment in skills development and, at times, substantial financial resources. The affordances of platforms themselves and levels of access offered to researchers, meanwhile, can change drastically and at little notice – as the closure of academic access to Twitter data in 2023 and closure of the CrowdTangle tool for accessing Facebook data in 2024.

This session will focus, then, on developing effective responses to these challenges. The emphasis will be on a need for flexibility and creativity in developing approaches which respond to and are appropriate for the specificities of individual platforms at the time of data collection. We will also explore the value of building in redundancy as a way of ensuring the ongoing viability of research projects in the event of unexpected changes to data access. This will provide students with a solid grounding in the key principles of research design in this context.

Session 3B | Kyunghye Kim
Journalistic Translation and Human vs AI

With the decline of traditional journalism business models, news organisations are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) in curating information and other journalistic tasks, including optimising headlines, carrying out translation, distributing the news and improving audience engagement, often without necessarily being noticed by news consumers. However, both news consumers and organisations have voiced concerns regarding AI’s inherent bias and its potential to produce misleading or unreliable information. These stakeholders have also called attention to the possibility that the news production ecosystem will heavily rely on Big Tech and platform companies, which would afford these enterprises more power and control over the information ecosystem and reshape the news environment.

Against this backdrop, this session will first be devoted to a discussion of current news curation and the information landscape and ecosystem reshaped by AI and large language models. It will introduce some critical views on the implementation of AI in news production, including the impartiality of information, the lack of accountability and the disclosure of AI involvement in news generation. The second session will involve a deliberation over how translation is combined with the dynamics of disrupted news production and will present potential research avenues. While acknowledging the benefits of AI translation in news production and delivery, as is the case with emergency alerts such as tsunami warnings, this session will also point out situations wherein AI news translation jeopardises news consumers and how such AI translation aggravates information asymmetry, thereby consolidating the powerful position of English as well as diminishing the distinctive features and cultural nuances of different languages.

MODULE 4 | Featured Theme
Human and Artificial Intelligence in Media Translation

Session 4A | Jonathan Evans
Mapping out AI in Media Translation and Digital Culture

This session will explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the forms of machine translation (MT) and algorithmic machine learning, in relation to media translation and digital culture. Beginning with a review of famous fictional translation systems, such as Star Trek’s Universal Translator and Douglas Adams’ babel fish, it argues that the public understanding of machine translation is as informed by these imagery devices as it is by actual technology. The goal for machine translation is thus a removal of the human translator and indeed the need for language learning. Examining the post-WWII history of machine translation, from rule-based to statistical to neural machine translation, it posits an ongoing shift from a system for understanding foreign texts and transmissions, to a system that is based on surveillance capitalism and extraction of linguistic data. Current machine translation systems are imbricated in 24/7 capitalism (Crary 2013), where attention and keeping users on a platform, as well as instant access to commodities, are central business practices.

The use of algorithmic machine learning by platforms and websites, in order to foreground content that results in high engagement (that is, material that tends to be affective and provocative), offer an alternative view on AI in translation. Questioning how materials are selected and promoted, this session will examine how algorithms shape international reception of translation materials and what gets excluded in such an environment. Finally, the session will explore alternatives to these practices, such as the return to analogue distribution, and how they might suggest translation practices for a (dystopian) post-digital future.

Session 4B | Luis Pérez González
Title and abstract coming soon

MODULE 5 | Academic Career Development

Session 5A | Neil Sadler
Research Design in Fluid and Unpredictable Social Media Contexts

A permanent academic post is the objective of many early career researchers. This session will focus on practical steps PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and academics on temporary contracts can take to position themselves for the greatest possible degree of job market success. It will argue that three key elements are required regardless of whether the goal is a post in Europe, China, the Middle East or anywhere else. First, to develop a detailed understanding of the specific skills and experiences that recruiters are looking for, acknowledging that they may differ significantly from context to context. Second, to carry out an honest and thorough audit of your existing CV to identify current areas of strength and weakness. Third, to develop a credible medium-term plan to fill any gaps and strengthen any areas that are lacking. The session will be structured around a series of practical exercises to take attendees through each element, culminating in an initial plan with concrete steps to take forward. While success can never be guaranteed, following these principles will ensure that attendees approach the job market in the strongest possible position.

Session 5B | Kyunghye Kim
Publishing in International Journals

Publishing in peer-reviewed international journals has become key to progress in an academic career, but this endeavour can be very stressful, especially for early-career researchers. Identifying a suitable outlet, pitching it at the right level, responding to review comments, writing a rebuttal letter, and communicating with editors during revision processes can be challenging as well. Moreover, some of the research assessment systems of academic institutions emphasise quantity over quality or even disregard book chapters and articles published in non-SSCI/A&HCI indexed journals. Certain academic institutions attach more importance to publishing outside primary fields of study, yet the different expectations and writing styles of each journal often mean that none of these related fields appreciate interdisciplinary work.

On the basis of the presenter’s experience as an editor, peer reviewer and author who has worked in higher education institutions with such a system, this session will cover the entire publishing process—from writing a paper in English, implementing strategic measures to find an appropriate journal, submitting manuscripts and undergoing review stages to dealing with rejection. The session will also include a discussion of (un)solicited book reviews and publishing beyond the field of translation studies, particularly in journals associated with other disciplinary domains that are potentially of interest to audiovisual and media translation scholars.

Tutorials

Provisional topics include:

    • Sexuality and gender in media translation (Jonathan Evans)
    • Games and gaming (Jonathan Evans)
    • History of media translation (Jonathan Evans)
    • Narrative analysis (Neil Sadler)
    • Practice theory and media translation (Henry Jones)
    • Research ethics in media translation studies (Henry Jones)
    • Networked communities of translators (Henry Jones)
    • Paratexts and media (Kyunghye Kim)
    • Translation and Activism (Mona Baker)
    • Fandom and Media Translation (Luis Pérez González)
    • Experimental Research Methods in Media Translation (Luis Pérez González)
    • Multimodality and Media Translation (Luis Pérez González)
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