The University of Sassari (ITALY) invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor position (Ricercatore “lettera b” - RTDb) in the area of ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION (SSD L-LIN/12 “Lingua e traduzione – lingua inglese”).

The call EXPIRES on JUNE 8^th 2020 at 12.00 p.m., and is available at the following link:

https://www.uniss.it/bandi/procedura-comparativa-n-4-ricercatori-universitari-ai-sensi-dellart-24-co-3-lettera-della-legge-2402010-n-2-posti-il-ssd-bio07-ecologia-bio09

Nancy Viviana Piñeiro, Freelance translator and interpreter

In 2021 the 13th meeting of the international Symposium on (Im)Politeness and the 7th meeting of the biannual iMean  (interaction and meaning)  conference will be merged for a meeting on the “pragmatics of translation” on 24-26 June, 2021. We hope that you will hold the dates and be able to join us.

We will invite papers on translation outcomes and processes which highlight a pragmatic angle of understanding the transfer of language phenomena across cultures and intra-culturally. We approach translation from a broad perspective, including written textual translation from source to target language as well as other modalities such as signing, simultaneous translation or audiovisual translation by professional and lay people. We also include topics such as explaining meaning to each other or translating sensual experience into language.

We hope that many people will address both (im)politeness/delicacy as well as translation issues within an interactional/pragmatics frame. However, in the tradition of both the symposium of politeness and i-mean, we also welcome papers on (im)politeness and interactional meaning more generally.

Deadline for abstracts: 1 October 2020

For more information, click here

Providing efficient and safe healthcare services is tenuous even at the best of times. Hospital staff who must also circumnavigate language barriers are placed in problematic, perhaps disastrous, situations if they have not received the proper training.

The Handbook of Research on Medical Interpreting is a compendium of essential reference material discussing the educational, ethical, pedagogical, and specialized aspects of medical interpreting. Featuring research on topics such as patient care, competent healthcare, and specialized training, this book is ideally designed for hospital staff, healthcare administrators, medical specialists, professional interpreters, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on a new, international perspective to the medical sciences.

For more information, click here

The Centre for Translation Studies (CTS) is an internationally recognised centre for research, scholarship and teaching in translation and interpreting, and has been awarded funding from Research England’s new Expanding Excellence in England (E3) fund to launch an ambitious new research programme. This programme brings together human-based research practices with cutting-edge advances in machine learning and AI,focusing on the convergence of human and automated approaches to different modalities of translation and interpreting in order to initiate a step-change in the broader translation research agenda. The ‘technological turn’ in translation/interpreting creates exciting opportunities, but it also requires fresh approaches in order to understand all the dimensions of its impact, to mitigate drawbacks and to derive truly innovative solutions.

To support the expansion programme, we seek to appoint a Research Fellow with expertise in at least one of the research areas of CTS and with a special interest in translation/interpreting technologies. The successful candidate will undertake research relevant to current and future projects in CTS, contribute to and lead on the development of external funding bids, develop interdisciplinary collaborative networks with academic and non-academic partners, and produce high-quality outputs.

We are looking for a candidate with a PhD in translation/interpreting studies or a closely related field. Research experience that is compatible with the strategic direction of CTS’s research, demonstrated by a track record of high-quality publications, is essential, as is the proven ability to secure external funding. The success of the research programme requires multidisciplinary collaborations. Experience in working with external partners would therefore be a plus.

This is a fixed-term contract until 31 August 2022 but there is a possibility to extend the post if external research funding can be secured.

Deadline for applications: 17 June 2020

For more information, click here

Series: New Trends in Translation Studies

Edited By Ali Almanna and Juan José Martínez Sierra

This volume affords an opportunity to reconsider international connections and conflicts from the specific standpoint of translation as a dynamic, sociocultural activity, carried out and influenced by numerous stakeholders. The various chapters contained in this volume survey a wide range of languages and cultures, and they all pivot around the relationships that can be established between translation and ideology, re-narration, identity, cultural representation and knowledge reproduction. The ultimate aim is to shed light on the actual act of translating in which the self is well-presented and beautified and the other is deformed and made ugly. In this volume, due consideration is given to the main frames (be they characterization, interpretive or identity frames) as well as to the nonverbal factors that play a fundamental role in forming the final shape of the translated product. 

For more information, click here

Special issue of Babel

Editors

Frans De Laet

Reiner Heard

Miodrag Vukčević

Übersetzen und Dolmetschen im juristischen Bereich / Traduction et interprétation juridiques / Legal Translation and Interpreting

Technologie – Outsourcing – Veränderungen / Technologie – externalisation – transformations / Technology – Outsourcing – Shifts

For more information, click here

This Special Collection of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship will focus on the global circulation of comics in digital forms, from webcomics to subscription services from traditional comics publishers. The Collection’s emphasis will be on the international, multi-lingual, multi-format, diverse nature of “comics”.

Comics have circulated in their original language and in translation since the inception of print: as a physical object, comics (including strips in newspapers) can travel across international borders with their readers, or they can be translated for publication in new locales. Recent technologies have made digital distribution possible, theoretically allowing for global access to comics published online anywhere in the world as well as the possibility of distributing translated versions within a proprietary system.

Translation is central to the global circulation of comics and comics as an art form are often experienced in translation (Evans 2017).  While there is a growing body of work on the translation and circulation of comics (Zanettin 2008, Altenberg and Owen 2015, Mälzer 2015, Reyns-Chikuma and Tarif 2016; see overview in Zanettin 2020), little has yet addressed the new world of digital distribution and how this is affecting translation practices. Work on the digital distribution of comics (e.g. Priego 2010, Steirer 2014, Crucifix et al. 2017-19, Augureau et al. 2018) has tended not to address this at a global scale or to investigate how comics are distributed across languages.

Translation can be both official and unofficial: scanlation -- the fan translation (Evans 2020) of comics -- is a vibrant practice that has found a home online, but it is unclear how the shift towards digital publishing by legacy publishers such as Marvel and DC has changed the environment for the practice. Nor is it clear how extensively platforms such as Comixology  have embraced translation and international distribution, as the French language site includes large quantities of untranslated, English language materials. Web comics as born digital objects may easily be distributed online, but there is less understanding of how they cross linguistic and cultural borders.

For this Special Collection, we are open for submissions that explore the intersections between the translation and distribution of comics, the latter understood in its most diverse, international sense, with a particular focus that goes beyond dominant themes that are over-represented in current scholarship. The Special Collection seeks original research articles that investigate the ways in which digital distribution has opened up, or closed down, access to comics produced globally. Are the old centres of the USA, France and Japan still central to comics production? Or has comics production been democratised and decentralised? How have different comics cultures adapted to and capitalised on digital distribution, and how are they reaching readers in other cultures (through translation)?

We are especially interested in the reception and translation of comics outside of the Anglosphere, which are typically overlooked, but also welcome work on American comics. We encourage research on the underrepresented areas of non-English language comics, LGBT+ comics, women’s comics and comics by people of colour. Contributions may use any relevant methodology to address the topic, but should follow the journal’s guidelines for submissions.

We call for submissions that are professionally written and presented, incorporating high-quality images that authors discuss directly and in detail. We will consider submissions from affiliated senior or early career scholars, practitioners and independent researchers, as long as they fit the journal’s call for papers, scope and editorial guidelines.

Deadline for first drafts: 30 June 2021

For more information, click here

The e-journal Lexis, Journal in English Lexicology, is planning to publish its 17th issue devoted to “Humor, creativity and lexical creation” in 2021. Co-editors: Lucile Bordet (University of Lyon (Jean Moulin Lyon 3) & Frédérique Brisset (University of Lille) will be happy to receive your abstracts up to 15 June 2020 at the following address:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Please clearly indicate the title of the paper and include an abstract of no more than 5,000 characters as well as a list of relevant keywords and references. All abstract and paper submissions will be anonymously peer-reviewed (double-blind peer reviewing) by an international scientific committee composed of specialists in their fields.
Papers will be written preferably in English or occasionally in French. Analyses may rely on various domains of linguistics, such as semantics, phonology, lexicography, morphology, stylistics, etc. Comparative studies involving translation are welcome too. All theoretical frameworks are welcome.

For more information, click here

Edited by: James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral

Many of the translation tools in use today were initially designed to cater for technical, repetitive texts. This is still their main niche 25 years after the first versions of these tools appeared. Computer-aided translation (CAT) and Machine translation (MT) were long regarded as unsuitable for the translation of creative texts, claimed to be the last bastion of human translation. Creative-text translation in this context refers to the translation of texts from one language to another where the texts themselves pivot broadly on the human creativity employed in their production. They rely heavily on aesthetics for their existence, more than texts that aim to bring about an outcome directly, as in the case of technical texts. Such creative texts include, but are not limited to:

fictional works, such as novels, short stories, poems, plays, and comics;

non-fictional texts, such as philosophical works, didactic books, and self-help books;

performative works, such as songs, speeches, films, TV shows, and computer games; and

promotional texts, such as commercials, advertisements, and propaganda. The end of the second decade of the twenty-first century appears pivotal to a shift in machine-assisted literary translation. MT has experienced a sea change over the last five years, thanks to the adoption of methods based on deep neural networks, to the point that there are now even claims of some MT systems reaching parity with human translators. In turn, human translators,including translators of creative texts, have benefited from advances in technology, through which internet search engines and online dictionaries and encyclopedias have made information mining significantly easier than in previous decades and centuries. While many translators of creative texts continue to shun translation technology or assume it is not relevant to them, others already make heavy use of CAT tools. These positive consequences of the technologization of translation in general are paving the way for a spread and development of technologies to support the translation of creative texts in particular. This book will embody the state of the art of translation technologies in the field of creative-text translation. At the same time, it will reflect on literary translators’ attitudes towards translation technology, and ethical aspects, as well as recent trends and technical developments in the field.

The book invites chapters of no more than 8,000 words (all inclusive) addressing key questions,that include, but are not limited to:

To what extent are translators of creative texts already making use of technology intheir work?

What are the specific issues pertaining to literature and other types of creative textsthat prove difficult for MT systems today?

What challenges do translators face when using technology for translating creativetexts?

What are the attitudes of translators to the use of technology in the translation ofcreative texts?

How do readers respond to literary works translated using machines?

Apart from MT, what other kinds of computer-based tools could be used by literarytranslators?

What are the ecological and ethical implications of increasing literary translators’

reliance on technology in their work?

How should copyright issues be taken into account in the use of MT in literarytranslation?

In the first instance, abstracts are sought from parties interested in contributing to the book.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 June 2020

For more information, click here