Items filtered by date: February 2019

The Department of French at University College Cork welcomes applications for a new studentship open to students wishing to pursue doctoral research in any area of French and Francophone studies. The studentship will be awarded in the form of a fee-waiver, and will be tenable from the date of first registration for a maximum of three years full-time.

The scholarship is open to EU and non-EU students. However, the funding will only cover the EU fee, so a successful non-EU applicant would be responsible for the balance.

The successful applicant will be required to apply for supplementary funding through the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme and through UCC's Research Excellence Scholarships (PhD) programme.

UCC's French Department has research expertise across French and Francophone studies, including:

Colonial and post-colonial history of the Francophone world.

Colonial and post-colonial Francophone literature.

Contemporary French theatre, film and poetry.

French political thought since 1789.

Translation studies.

French language and linguistics.

Details of individual staff research profiles can be found here:

https://www.ucc.ie/en/french/people/

As part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, we can offer co-supervision in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural projects in areas including conflict studies; memory studies; translation studies; creative practice; comparative literature and culture; film, photography and visual culture; and critical theory. The School’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC) supports interdisciplinary co-operation and provides a framework for researchers to collaborate across departmental divides.

Our doctoral students are also supported in their graduate education, research training and career development by the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences.

UCC Department of French will run an internal selection process to decide the allocation of this studentship. All applicants should read the Terms and Conditionsprior to application.

Deadline for submission of completed applications: Friday, 26 April 2019.

Informal enquiries about projects can be made in the first instance to the Head of Department, Dr Patrick Crowley (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

Full details: https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/academic/french/PhDStudentshipFrench2019.pdf

4 March 2019: 5-7pm: University of London, Senate House

Article originally appear on The Conversation. 

 Authors: Loradana Polezzi, Jo Angouri, Rita Wilson

Within a week of the Salzburg Global Seminar’s Statement for a Multilingual Worldlaunching in February 2018, the document – which calls for policies and practices that support multilingualism – had received 1.5m social media impressions.

The statement opens with some striking facts, including that “all 193 UN member states and most people are multilingual”. It also points out that 7,097 languages are currently spoken across the world but 2,464 of these are endangered. Just 23 languages dominate among these 7,097, and are spoken by over half of the world’s population.

As these statistics show, the soundtrack of our lives and the visual landscapes of our cities are multilingual. Languages, in their plurality, enrich our experience of the world and our creative potential. Multilingualism opens up new ways of being and of doing, it connects us with others and provides a window into the diversity of our societies. And yet, despite the more positive statistics above, we are currently witnessing a deep divide.

On the one hand, multilingualism is associated with mobility, productivity and knowledge creation (see, for instance, the EU’s objective for all citizens to speak two languages in addition to their first one). On the other, monolingualism (speaking only one language) is still perceived as both the norm and the ideal for an allegedly well-functioning society. Linguistic diversity is seen as both suspicious and costly.

Linguistic penalties

This is particularly visible in relation to the most vulnerable groups seeking a new home: refugees and asylum seekers. Newcomers are often required to prove they can read, write and speak the national language/s to be given the right to remain. Fluency, however, goes beyond technical ability in the majority languages. In the 1980s, researchers showed that language is more than just a code by which we communicate, it is related to social and political knowledge, and access to power structures.

Standing out from the crowd. Nat.photo/ShutterstockLanguage skills are critically important for engagement with a host society and lacking those skills can be an insurmountable barrier for accessing opportunities in education, work, and other areas of social life. Success in finding one’s place in a new social context, however, requires more than instrumental use of language.

Research has shown that refugees pay a “linguistic penalty” when transitioning to a new socioeconomic environment. That penalty refers to the consequences of being categorised as “different” or not “one of us” on the basis of language performance that does not follow established societal norms.

Speakers who inadvertently break societal rules of expected behaviour are assessed as “not having enough language”, which becomes a proxy for an inability to “fit in”. That inability, in turn, is interpreted as a moral deficiency: lack of fluency becomes a sign of insufficient desire to become “one of us” and marks the migrant as both a “failed” and a “bad” citizen.

Language, held up as a sign of belonging, becomes a gatekeeper for inclusion/exclusion, regulating access to citizenship and education, health and legal protection. The responsibility for success or failure falls firmly on the shoulders of the “other” – the migrant, the minority member, the one who “does not fit in”. This process is clearly visible in citizenship and language tests. The tests blur language assessment with reproducing and assessing abstract values about the home society. They take a narrow approach to cultural diversity and represent one hegemonic set of “ways of doing things around here”.

Deficit approach

The myth of one nation, one (national) language, one (national) culture – which was at the heart of the ideal of the nation state in the 19th and 20th centuries – perpetuates the master narrative of national homogeneity. The consistent and robust evidence that “native speakers” (a political term in its own right) fail citizenship tests and that the evaluation process is deeply political has not yet produced an alternative narrative.

By projecting a deficit approach onto refugees and asylum seekers, their contribution to society is dismissed and both their presence and the linguistic diversity attached to it are perceived as problems or costs. This mechanism of exclusion relies on a hierarchy in which not all languages are equal or desirable.

“Their” language(s) are low on the pecking order that the majority perceive as needed or wanted. Monolingual models insist on a “subtractive” principle in which one dominant language replaces another less “desirable” one, rather than recognising and valuing how multilingualism, by adding the ability to communicate in more than one language, can benefit everyone in our increasingly connected world.

These attitudes silence the contributions that new multilingual citizens make to economic growth, social cohesion or artistic production. A different approach is urgently needed, one that moves away from multilingualism as deficit and towards a recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity as a creative engine of civic participation and social well-being.

School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies are delighted announce that call for SALIS PhD Scholarship 2019 is now open.

How to Apply:

Potential applicants should read the 2019 SALIS PhD Scholarship Call carefully to ascertain whether or not they are eligible to apply. Applicants must apply using Application form available to download from here. Candidates should email their applications in a single pdf file to the SALIS School Office (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) putting SALIS PhD scholarships 2018-19 in the subject line

Topics:

We are particularly interested in receiving research proposals in the following areas:
Applied Linguistics; Cultural Studies; Intercultural Studies, Migration Studies; Literary Studies; Sexuality Studies; and Translation Studies.

Read more at https://www.dcu.ie/salis/Scholarship-2019.shtml?fbclid=IwAR0tnP78iWJwPUZO9YAqLD1kuT2NahlFR8K400nOI3pQl2kKmVwoLnP7Beg

About the award

Project Summary:

The RusTrans project explores the role played by Russian-to-English literary translation in constructing national identity. It includes four case studies of translators of Russian literature and their networks, in Ireland, the UK, and the USA.

Project Description:

Applications are invited for three ERC-funded PhD studentships in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter to work with the lead researchers on the “RusTrans: Dark Side of Translation” project. This project investigates the ideology underlying the practice of Russian-to-English literary translation in the 20th and 21st centuries. The fully funded studentships, beginning in September 2019, are hosted at the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus. The studentships are for 3.5 years and are open to students of any nationality. Each studentship will cover University tuition fees with a stipend equivalent to the Research Councils UK national minimum stipend (£14,777 in 2018/19). Candidates will be expected to have completed a Master’s degree by the time of starting the studentship; they should not yet have formally commenced a doctoral project.

Each candidate is expected to develop their own research question within one of three areas of investigation linked to the project, while assisting the PI and Postdoctoral fellow with project-related research and administration.

One candidate will contribute to the research on the “Publishing Translations from Russian Today” case study, while developing a PhD dissertation on a related issue in the history or practice of contemporary (post-2000) Russian-to-English literary translation.

The second candidate will work with the project’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr McAteer, on the “David Magarshack and Penguin Books” case study, while preparing a PhD dissertation on a topic relevant to the twentieth-century history or practice of Russian-to-English literary translation.

The third candidate will be expected to develop a PhD topic addressing the literary translation of Russian into the language of a nation where Russian culture exerts or has exerted a strong influence (e.g. Poland, Finland, or Estonia) in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. This candidate will receive additional limited funding to carry out research in the nation of his or her research focus.

All three candidates will assist the PI and Postdoctoral Fellow with conference organization, website management (including writing regular blog posts and contributing to the project’s social media accounts), and other project administration. Some funding will be provided for research-related travel. Candidates will have opportunities to present their research at the project’s two international conferences in 2020 and 2022, and to co-write articles on the project case studies with Dr Maguire and Dr McAteer.

More information about the project can be found at http://rustrans.exeter.ac.uk/.

Key research questions include (within the context of Russian-to English literary translation): Why do translators select the texts that they do? Who funds the translation process, and with what aim? How do target audiences, critics, and national governments react to the translated texts (and do their perceptions of the source culture change as a result)? Which Russian authors, classified in terms of their political views and potential for literary or popular appeal, are currently being translated for the Anglophone market? What kind of writers have been supported by Russian-state-funded organizations, since the 2000’s? How many translators advocate for Russian-language authors, and what networks of contacts, grant agencies, etc. do they employ to this end? Is literary translation still viable as a career?

The successful candidates will benefit from joining the dynamic and supportive postgraduate research community in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, including the Centre for Translating Cultures at the Department of Modern Languages and our expanding programme of Translation Studies. You can expect to gain expertise in a wide range of transferable research skills, including interviewing, archival research, data analysis and management. Supervision will be shared between Dr Muireann Maguire and Dr Cathy McAteer.
.
The RusTrans project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 802437).

For more information about the project and informal enquiries, please contact the primary supervisor, Dr Muireann Maguire

Read more at http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=3463#LXMKGqYr9vve0Oes.99 

KäTu2019: TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING SPACES

Tampere University 12-13 April 2019

THEME OF THE KÄTU2019 SYMPOSIUM

The theme of the 2019 KäTu Symposium is Translation and Interpreting Spaces.

The theme could be approached from the following example points of view:

• The current state of translation studies research, industry, or teaching
• Physical and digital spaces for translation, interpreting, and the teaching of translation & interpreting
• Mobility, remote work and internet-based work
• Working spaces and tools
• Economic states in the field
• The mental spaces of translating and interpreting

Keeping in line with the traditions of the KäTu symposia, papers on other issues of translation and interpreting are also warmly welcome.

For more information, visit https://katu-symposiumi.com/first-circular-and-call-for-papers/?fbclid=IwAR3l1S-sjaJ48-Qbf3jPvg7uK82GVcDo5BzqAtf3ACW6OgGl0EZA7XQoME8

International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture

1-6 July 2019

The terms audiovisual translation, media translation and translation technologies have acquired and continue to enjoy great visibility in the field of translation studies. This research school will foster an open and wide-ranging take on media translation and digital culture, and the significance of both for and beyond translation studies; encourage cross-fertilization between the disciplinary sub-fields designated by the above terms; and address the new theoretical and methodological tools that translation scholars need in order to understand the strategic and catalyzing role played by translation in relation to a number of issues, including the following:

• Reconfiguring the ecology of networked media – from mainstream news organizations to citizen journalism outlets; from printed written articles to multimodal assemblages; from professional reportage to amateur coverage of conflicts and natural disasters;
• (Re)producing shifting public discourses about cosmopolitanism, gender, nation, expertise, fandom or activism – among other core issues;
• Developing more collaborative, participatory and deliberative processes of community formation, both online and on the ground;
• Enabling disciplinary discourses and developments in the fields of multimodality, media sociology, cultural studies, journalism, globalization studies and critical theories of communication technology.

The International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture is aimed at an international audience and will primarily address the needs of doctoral and early career researchers in translation and interpreting studies, as well as more experienced academics who are new to the discipline or interested in engaging with recent developments in the field. It aims to contribute to realizing one of the priorities of the Jiao Tong Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, namely, advancing the study of translation in the context of digital (audiovisual) media and online spaces.

The School will take place in Jiao Tong University, Shanghai once every two years, starting in July 2019 and rotating thereafter with the ARTIS International Research School.

For more information, visit https://www.jiaotongbakercentre.org/media-school/

Call for papers

The major themes to be covered at Intermedia 2019 include:

• current trends and challenges in audiovisual translation
• media accessibility services and solutionsaudience reception
• participatory accessibility, with end users involved in the making
• new modalities of audiovisual translation (live interlingual subtitling with respeaking)
• experimental research in AVT
• new methodologies in AVT research
• audiovisual translation quality assessment
• audiovisual translator training
• history of AVT
• linking AVT researchers and practitionerscloud solutions in AVT
• impact of technologies on AVT

INTERMEDIA 2019 will be preceded by an exciting day filled with workshops on 18 September.

Please submit your abstract by 31 March 2019 by following this link to Easy Chair. Please note you need to have an EasyChair account and log in first.

For more information, visit https://intermedia.ils.uw.edu.pl/call-for-papers/?fbclid=IwAR2dEFmS7hCOfeqMLHlfPru5apgfcJMTUFUcWV-jof63V0Xi_8odKRW4mvc

The 10th International Symposium for Young Researchers in Translation, Interpreting, Intercultural Studies and East Asian Studies will be held on the 21st June 2019 at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is on March 11th, 2019. Abstracts must be submitted using the on-line form.

The 10th Symposium for Young Researchers is aimed at students who have recently begun their research as M.A. students, PhD students or those who have recently completed their PhD theses. The purpose of this symposium is to provide a scientific forum within which the next generation of researchers can exchange ideas and present their current research in the field of Translation, Interpreting, Intercultural Studies or East Asian Studies.

We invite proposals for papers relating to the research interests of the Department of Translation and Interpreting & East Asian Studies (UAB), namely:

Translation and interpreting

Specialized translation

Literary translation

Audiovisual translation and media accessibility

InterpretingInformation and communication technologies in translation

Translator and interpreter training

History of translation and interpreting

Interculturality, ideology and the sociology of translation and interpreting

Textuality and translation

Cognitive studies in translation and interpreting

Professional aspects of translation and interpretingEmpirical research in translation and interpreting

East Asian studies

East Asian languages and literatures

Politics and international relations in East Asia

Culture, thought, and interculturality in East AsiaEconomy of East Asia

The symposium languages are English, Catalan and Spanish.

Participants should limit their presentations to 15 minutes to allow time for Q & A and comments by the audience.

No proceedings will be published. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance. A further certificate will be given to those who read papers.

For more information, visit http://pagines.uab.cat/simposi/en

News Discourse and Translation

In contexts of globalization (or de-globalization), news discourse plays an indispensable role by disseminating meaning that is manufactured, constructed, or negotiated by news workers over the course of presentation or representation.

With Industry 4.0 in place, featuring “smart things” on various fronts, the amount of data to be processed has increased exponentially. This new era characterized by highly interactive and customized news stories further enforces changes in the way news discourse to be perceived and consumed.

Furthermore, translation has facilitated the instantaneity of news flow around the world by simultaneously addressing members of different linguistic and cultural communities through the Internet or mobile apps. It will undoubtedly serve to intensify or reduce or mediate the opposition and interaction between the global and the local.

Against this backdrop, news dissemination manifested in news discourse calls for investigations from the academia from more perspectives with more interdisciplinary approaches.

Call for papers

We invite contributions from researchers working within any theoretical or methodological or practical perspectives who are interested in the intersection between news media, discourse, language, translation, culture and communication to this conference. You may have 20-minute oral presentations that report original research related to the following themes of the conference which may include, but are not limited to:

• Globalization or localization of news discourse
• News discourse and interactionLinguistic approaches to news language
• Discourse analysis of news storyNews discourse and context
• News discourse and intercultural communicationNews translation
• News translation and technology
• News translation and pedagogy

Submission of Abstracts

Anonymous abstracts not exceeding 300 words in length (excluding references) must be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Names and affiliation of the author(s) should be included in the accompanying email.

Note: Selected works will be invited to submit the full paper for publication in an edited volume to be proposed to world leading publisher such as Routledge after the conference.

Deadline for abstract submission: March 31 2019

Notification sent to applicants: April 15 2019

Registration for conference opens: April 2019

For more information, visit https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/english/research/news-discourse-and-translation.aspx?fbclid=IwAR0UeoAJS1pPC9aNjMY3iWTV67Q87GSi2RexmVBMeFDvin1GT1jdukMeVeo