The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham seeks to appoint an outstanding candidate to a twelve-month fixed term full-time Teaching Fellowship in Translation Studies and French. The appointment is tenable from 1 September 2019. The successful candidate will be expected to provide excellent teaching and carry out service to the School. We welcome applications from exceptional teachers with an ability to teach technology-based translation (including CAT, post-editing MT, project management software, and corpora) to MA students in Translation Studies, and to contribute to the teaching of translation into and/or out of French to MA students and to undergraduates studying for the BA in Modern Languages and Cultures and associated programmes.

The post is to provide temporary replacement following a recent retirement. The post will commence on 1 September 2019 and will end on
31 August 2020; it is not anticipated that the post will be extended beyond this fixed term.

Closes midday on : 03-Jul-2019

For more information, click here. 

Guest Editors: María Calzada Pérez (Universitat Jaume I)

and Sara Laviosa (Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro)

This special issue is intended to be a self-reflexive research work that looks back and forward upon corpus-based translation studies (CTS). Similarly to other publications in the field (e.g. Laviosa 1998; Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004; Kruger et al. 2011), looking back brings us to at least 1993, when Mona Baker officially envisaged a turning point in the history of the discipline. Baker was not the first person to undertake corpus-based research (see, for example, Gellerstam 1986; Lindquist 1989), but she was undoubtedly the scholar who most forcefully predicted what the future had in store. And her premonitions were realized in virtually no time. Research has grown exponentially from 1993 onwards in the very aspects Baker had anticipated (corpora, methods and tools).

We believe it is time we pause and reflect (critically) upon our research domain. And we want to do so in what we see is a relatively innovative way: by importing Taylor and Marchi ‘s (2018) spirit and methodologies from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) into CTS. Like them, we want to place our emphasis precisely on the faulty areas within our studies. We aim to deal with the issues we have left undone; or those we have neglected. In short, and drawing on Taylor and Marchi’s (2008) work, we propose to devote this volume to revisiting our own partiality and cleaning some of our dustiest corners.

Regarding partiality, Taylor and Marchi (2018: 8) argue that “[u]nderstandably, most people just get on with the task of doing their research rather than discussing what didn’t work and how they balanced it.” Going back to our previous research, identifying some of its pitfalls, and having another go at what did not work is a second chance we believe we deserve. Looking at our object of study from different viewpoints or within new joined efforts, plunging into (relatively) new practices, such as CTS triangulation (see Malamatidou 2017), may be one of the ways in which we can now contribute to going back to post-modernity; and do things differently. As to dusty corners (“both the neglected aspects of analysis and under-researched topics and text types” (Taylor and Marchi, 2018: 9), like Taylor (2018) we need further work on (translated) absence; similarities (as well as differences); silent voices, non-dominant languages, amongst many other concerns.

The present CFP, then, is interested in theoretical, descriptive, applied and critical papers (from CTS and external fields) that make a contribution to tackling CTS partiality and dusty spots of any kind. We particularly (but not only) welcome papers including:

critical evaluation of one’s own workawareness of (old/new) research design issuesuse of new protocols and tools to examine corporaidentification of areas where accountability is required and methods to guarantee accountabilitycases of triangulation of all kindsstudies of absences in originals and/or translationsstudies of new voices, minoritised (and non-named) languages, multimodal texts, etc.pro-active proposals to bring CTS forward

PRACTICAL INFORMATION AND DEADLINES

Please submit abstracts (in Catalan, English, Italian, and Spanish) of approximately 500 words, including relevant references (not included in the word count), to both This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Abstract deadline: 1 November 2019

Acceptance of proposals: 1 January 2020

Submission of papers: 31 May 2020

Acceptance of papers: 15 September 2020

Submission of final versions of papers: 15 November 2020

Publication: December 2020

The School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol is seeking to appoint a Research Associate with expertise in translation technology. The researcher will contribute to the project ‘Improving Products and Processes in Translation Technology Use’ (IMPETUS), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). The project will build a body of empirical evidence on several aspects of professional translation practice. It will explore topics including use of neural machine translation and longitudinal perceptions of translating productivity. The job will involve conducting workplace experiments, analysing data, writing research papers and giving conference presentations under the direction of Dr Lucas Nunes Vieira (PI) and in collaboration with Professor Michael Carl (Kent State University, USA), Dr Elisa Alonso (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain) and industry partners. The post will also encompass research impact duties including participation in industry events and collaboration with translation companies.

The expected start date is 1 September 2019 and the position has funding for 1.5 years.

Closing date: 10 July 2019

For the full job spec and to apply:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/details.html?nPostingId=45454&nPostingTargetId=143699&id=Q50FK026203F3VBQBV7V77V83&LG=UK&mask=uobext

Applications are invited for an ERC-funded PhD studentship 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 five-year project investigates the ideology underlying the practice of Russian-to-English literary translation in the 20th and 21st centuries. The fully funded studentship, beginning in January 2020, will be hosted at the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus. The studentship is for 3.5 years and is open to students of any nationality. The studentship will cover University tuition fees at Home, EU, or International rates, with a stipend equivalent to the Research Council’s UK national minimum stipend (£15,009 in 2019/20). 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.

The successful candidate will be expected to develop an independent research question relevant to the RusTrans project, while assisting the PI, Dr Muireann Maguire, and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Cathy McAteer, with project-related research and administration. This research question should address the literary translation of Russian into the language of a non-Anglophone nation anywhere in the globe where Russian culture exerts or has exerted a strong cultural or political influence in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Some funding will be provided for research-related travel, including limited funding to carry out research in the nation of his or her research focus. In addition, the successful candidate 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. He or she will have opportunities to present new 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 here. The closing date for applications in September 2, 2019.

For more information, visit http://rustrans.exeter.ac.uk/about/how-to-get-involved/phd-studentship-in-the-history-of-literary-translation-from-russian-into-another-language/

The Centre for Translation Studies (CTS) has been awarded a £3.56m Expanding Excellence in England grantto launch an ambitious new research programme, bringing together human-based research practices with cutting-edge advances in machine learning and AI, and focussing 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. We believe this direction of research is critical at a time when advances in automation are reshaping the language services industry into one of the fastest growing industries, nationally and globally. The ‘technological turn’ in translation 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 complement existing excellence in CTS in researching applications of technologies in translation and interpreting, we are therefore seeking to appoint a dynamic research leader with a proven track record in language and translation technologies, including machine learning and AI as applied to translation, and a strong interest in combining human and automated approaches to translation.

The post holder will develop and lead a research group in translation technologies, driving research in CTS in this area and making a significant contribution to achieving the strategic goals of CTS’s expanding research programme. She/he will also contribute academic leadership to CTS’s translation programmes and develop updates of the programme portfolio to ensure it embraces emerging industry and research trends.

The successful candidate will be expected to demonstrate world-leading and world-changing research with outputs that are consistently recognised as internationally excellent in the field. She/he will have a significant track record of securing external research funding. Clear evidence of a commitment to collaboration with academic and non-academic partners will be essential as will be evidence of excellence in the development and delivery of teaching and the promotion of student experience.

Please note this post complements further new posts available in CTS. There will also be an opportunity to appoint a post-doctoral researcher in accordance with the research area of the successful candidate.

For an informal discussion regarding this post, please contact Prof Sabine Braun, Director of CTS by email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

For more information, visit https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=043019

Special Issue of Translation Spaces on Fair Machine Translation: Building ethical and sustainable MT workflows

Guest edited by: Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny and Félix do Carmo

Special issue due for publication as Translation Spaces 9(1), July 2020

Since the well-publicised advent of neural MT, many more language service providers have begun to offer raw and post-edited MT as a reduced-cost option among their suite of products (Lommel and DePalma 2016). The level of automation in translation is usually related to the perishability of the text, along with considerations of regulatory compliance and risk, but new use cases are regularly appearing for NMT where automation might previously have been considered unwise (Moorkens 2017, Way 2018).

Meanwhile, research on MT has tended to focus on building systems to maximise the quality of output, evaluating that output in a cost-effective way, along with various forms of pre- and post-processing of texts. There has been little focus on the sort of workflows that these MT systems would be built into outside of experimental conditions, and where these workflows have been considered, the focus has been on efficiency and utility (Plitt and Masselot 2010, O’Brien 2011).

Likewise, the origin and ownership of training data have received scant attention. At present, claims and counterclaims for copyright of translations all have legal merit without having been tested, yet they are largely ignored within the translation industry (Troussel and Debussche 2014). These conflicting claims could have an anticommons effect, in which there are so many competing claims on a resource that it becomes impossible to use or exploit it. Work created by a machine does not currently qualify for copyright, meaning that the copyright – and liability – lies with the operator. This risk is rarely considered in MT use. When repurposing and retasking human translations and translation fragments, the industry is also avoiding a discussion on the ethical dimensions of data management, including consent for secondary use, copyright management, and data ownership – issues that affect not just vendors but also clients.

And where the original motivation for MT was utopian, the main driver is now the pressure to reduce human costs. If translation is reduced to a series of “language-replacement exercises” (Pym 2003) to be carried out at speed by freelance workers while their productivity rate is quantified within a translation tool, there is a real risk that talent will be discouraged (Abdallah 2014). How do we train students to enter such an industry – or should we even do so? And does the very existence of machine translation undermine efforts to train translators or – more broadly – to educate language learners, in the first place?

At this point, we think it worth looking at the ethics of MT use in industry and the economic and social effects on all stakeholders.

With these issues in mind, we would like to invite submissions that respond to the following and related questions:

• What would an ethical MT supply chain look like?
• How can translation data be used efficiently, but in a way that respects the rights of all agents in the supply chain?
• How has our approach to risk evolved in the context of machine translation?
• What role is played by technology in supporting the business models that are reshaping this chain?
• What real effect do mergers and acquisitions create on the sustainability of translation as an industry and for the people that live in it?
• How can we guarantee the safety of our products for consumers, while maximising the social quality (Abdallah 2014) of all workers in the industry?
• How can we continue to attract and retain human talent in the translation industry?
• What can academics and translator trainers do to make a positive impact on the use of automation in the translation industry?

Instructions for contributors

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words long and should follow the journal’s house style. Full instructions for authors can be found on the journal website. Articles are to be submitted via Editorial Manager, choosing the option for this special issue.

Please send any enquiries to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with the subject line ‘Translation Spaces’.

Schedule

October 15th 2019 – deadline submission of full articles for peer review

December 18th 2019 – feedback from peer-review to authors

January 20th 2020 – deadline for submission of authors’ revised articles

January 24th 2020 – feedback from guest editors on revised articles

January 29th 2020 – deadline for submission of final version

March 25th 2020 – proofs sent to authors

July 2020 – publication

For  more information, visit http://fairmt.adaptcentre.ie/2019/07/01/special-issue-of-translation-spaces/

The fifth Translation Studies Summer School organised by SoFT, Société Française de Traductologie, this year with the University of Alicante, will be held at Sede de la Nucía in the town of La Nucía (Spain) from July 22nd to July 26th 2019

This intensive course is designed to reflect on the history, the theories, the methodologies and the issues in literary and specialised translation. It is a crash course in the field of translation studies for students, translators and researchers, which consists of lectures followed by practical workshops. Participants will receive a certificate of attendance at the end of the course. A variety of cultural activities are included in the programme. Accommodation is provided from Sunday evening to Friday morning.

Intended audience: students studying for a doctorate, a Master’s degree or a degree in translation studies; professional translators; researchers in the field of translation studies.

Languages: mastery of French and English is essential in order to follow the program. The presentations will be in French or in English.

Documents: a booklet related to the sessions will be sent to the participants in June 2019.

Please contact

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

to receive the program and the registration form

For any further information please contact:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

To pay the registration fees, please consult page “Université d’été 2019 ”:

www.societefrancaisedetraductologie-soft.fr

Special Issue of MonTI-CTS SPRING-CLEANING: A CRITICAL REFLECTION
Editors: María Calzada Pérez and Sara Laviosa

This special issue is intended to be a self-reflexive research work that looks back and forward upon corpusbased translation studies (CTS). This is not the first time such an endeavour has been carried out. The reason is quite obvious. It is always healthy and productive to assess and re-assess the state-of-the-art before we put forward new (un)desirable premonitions. And, with corpus-based studies, the future and the past merge at an incredibly fast speed.

Similarly to other publications in the field (see, by way of example, Laviosa 1998; Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004; Xiao 2010; Kruger et al. 2011), looking back brings us to, at least 1993, when Mona Baker officially envisaged a turning point in the history of the discipline: 

I would like to argue that this turning point will come as a direct consequence of access to large corpora of both original and translated texts, and the development of specific methods and tools for interrogating such corpora in ways which are appropriate to the needs of translation scholars. (Baker 1993: 235)

Baker was not the first person to undertake corpus-based research (see, for example, (Gellerstam 1986; Lindquist 1989), but she was undoubtedly the scholar who most forcefully predicted what the future had in store. And her premonitions were realized in virtually no time. Already in 1998, there was enough corpusbased work for Sara Laviosa to put forward possibly the most well-known compilation on the subject in a special issue for Meta. Journal des traducteurs. By 2004, corpus-based studies was, in Baker’s (Baker 2004: 169) own words “too much rather than too little to go on”.

Indeed, research has grown exponentially from 1993 onwards, as all monographs testify, in the very aspects Baker had anticipated. Corpora became larger and larger; and then smaller and smaller (but more specialized). They are, as (Xiao & Yue 2009) show us, monolingual and multilingual; parallel, comparable, comparative; general and specialized; they adopt simple or complex configurations, as (Zanettin 2012) , reminds us when he talks about star- or diamond-shaped corpora. They are built upon multiple layers of parameters (cf. Laviosa 2012).

Methods (and theoretical results) have also proliferated and have meant “new ways of looking at translation” (Kenny in Laviosa 2011: 13) . Drawing on Partington, Duguid, & Taylor (2013: 13) , these new perspectives can be said to derive from different forms of comparison. Thus, simple comparisons entail the analysis of two different subcorpora (like when Moropa 2011 studies a set of texts in English vis-à-vis their Xhosa translations); serial comparisons involve the contrastive analysis of corpus A and corpus B, and then corpus A and corpus C, and so on (like when, for instance, Bosseaux 2006 examines Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and two of its translations into French). Multiple comparisons occur when corpus A is set against a pool of subcorpora at once. Partington et al. (2013: 13) explain that “those studies which employ the BNC [British National Corpus] or the Bank of English [BoE] as a background or reference corpus are of this multiple-comparison type” (for example, when Kenny 2001 double-checks her GEPCOLT results against the BNC, she is performing multiple comparisons). Diachronic comparisons involve the exploration of translation-related corpus throughout time and are still, admittedly, rare (Calzada Perez 2017; Calzada Pérez 2018) however, does precisely this with her European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive, ENPC). All these comparative methods have been put at the service of notably descriptive and applied translation studies. The aim was to unveil regularities of various kinds (as Zanettin 2012, most aptly exemplifies): of translation, of translators, of languages, of learning behaviour, of interpreting protocols.

Corpus tools have also beed devised at a frantic speed. There are all kinds of programs for each of the stages of compilation: web crawlers (some of which specialized in corpus building such as BootCaT), editing suites for a wide variety of formats (from txt raw corpora to xml marked up and annotated corpora); parsers, taggers and annotators (such as CLAWS, Tree Tagger, FreeLing; USAS); Corpus Management systems of very different types (like IMS Open Corpus Workbench, MODNLP; CQPWeb, SketchEngine; WMatrix); Concordancers (like AntConc, WordSmith Tools, TCA2, Glossa). There are also a wide variety of plugins generating all kinds of information for analysis: statistics, word lists, keyword lists, concordances, collocates, word clouds, word profiles, tree graphs.

With such an exponential growth, some predictions have been fulfilled, others have been abandoned. Hence, we believe it is time we pause and reflect (critically) upon our research domain. And we want to do so in what we see is a relatively innovative way: by importing Taylor and Marchi 's (2018) spirit from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) into CTS. Like them, we want to place our emphasis precisely on the faulty areas within our studies. We believe that, rather than hiding them under the carpet, we can learn valuable lessons from them. Thus, we aim to deal with the issues we have left undone; or those we have neglected. In short, and drawing on Taylor and Marchi’s (2008) work, we propose to devote this volume to revisiting our own partiality and cleaning some of our dustiest corners.

Regarding partiality, Taylor and Marchi (2018: 8) argue that 

Understandably, most people just get on with the task of doing their research rather than discussing what didn’t work and how they balanced it. However, this then means that any new comers to the area, or colleagues starting out on a new project, have to reinvent those checks and balances anew each time.

Going back to our previous research, identifying some of its pitfalls, and having another goal at what did not work is a second chance we believe we deserve. Looking at objects of study from various viewpoints (out of new personal projects or joined efforts) may bring about a polyhedric multiplicity that we think will add up to what we already know. Plunging into (relatively) new practices, such as triangulation (see Malamatidou 2017), from our CTS springboard, may be one of the ways in which we can now contribute to going back to post-modernity; and do things differently.

As to dusty corners (“both the neglected aspects of analysis and under-researched topics and text types” (Taylor and Marchi, 2018: 9), we share many of  those presented by Taylor and Marchi at the Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies Conference in 2018. In this way, we need further methods to identify (translated) absence; we could benefit from further protocols and tools to delve into similarities (as well as differences); we would do well to concentrate on voices that are still silent, non-dominant languages, non-named languages, multimodal texts, amongst many other concerns.

The present CFP, then, is interested in theoretical, descriptive, applied and critical papers (from CTS and external fields) that make a contribution to tackling CTS partiality and dusty spots of any kind. We particularly (but not only) welcome papers including:
• critical evaluation of one’s own work
• awareness of (old/new) research design issues
• use of new protocols and tools to examine corpora
• identification of areas where accountability is required and methods to guarantee accountability
• cases of triangulation of all kinds
• studies of absences in originals and/or translations
• studies of new voices, minoritised (and non-named) languages, multimodal texts, etc.
• pro-active proposals to bring CTS forward

Practical information and deadlines
Please submit abstracts (in Catalan, English, Italian, and Spanish) of approximately 500 words, including  relevant references (not included in the word count), to both This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Abstract deadline: 1 November 2019
Acceptance of proposals: 1 January 2020
Submission of papers: 31 May 2020
Acceptance of papers: 15 September 2020
Submission of final versions of papers: 15 November 2020
Publication: December 2020

Registration is now open for the 9th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies: Living Translation: People, Processes, Products. It will be hosted in South Africa, at Stellenbosch University, from 9 to 13 September 2019.

For more information, visit https://www.est2019.com/

In the meantime, please direct questions and enquiries to the logistics and conference organisers, XL Millennium Conference & Event Management on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The Jiao Tong Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies is pleased to announce the launch of The Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar

The Award is established in honour of the late Professor Martha Cheung (1953-2013), formerly Chair Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. Professor Cheung was an internationally renowned scholar whose work on Chinese discourse on translation made a seminal contribution to the reconceptualization of translation from non-Western perspectives. For a brief biography and a list of her most important publications, see Professor Martha Pui Yiu Cheung’s Publications.

The Martha Cheung Award aims to recognize research excellence in the output of early career researchers, and to allow them, like Professor Cheung herself, to make their voices heard in the international arena and play a role in charting the future directions of research in the discipline. The restriction of the award to articles published in English is also intended to ensure consistency in the assessment process.

The Award

The award is conferred annually for the best paper published in English in the previous two-year period, and takes the form of a cash prize of 10,000 RMB. A certificate from the Jiao Tong Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies will also be presented.

Eligibility

• Applicants must have completed their PhD during the five-year period preceding the deadline for submission of applications.
• Given the emphasis on early career scholars, the award is restricted to single-authored articles: co-authored articles will not be considered.
• The scholarly article submitted must be already published. Work accepted for publication but in press will not be considered.
• The term ‘published’ also covers online publication.
• The article must have been published within 5 years of the applicant gaining his or her PhD degree.
• The article must have been published in English, in a peer-reviewed journal of good standing. Book chapters and entries in reference works do not qualify.
• The article does not have to have appeared in a journal of translation or interpreting. Journals of media, linguistics, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, etc. all qualify, as long as the article engages with translation/interpreting in a sustained manner.
• Submissions will be assessed solely on their scholarly merit, as judged by a panel of established scholars; considerations such as formal journal ranking and impact factor will not form part of the judging criteria.
• The article may present research relating to any area of translation, interpreting or intercultural studies, and may draw on any theoretical models or methodologies.

Submission

Applicants may apply directly themselves for the award, or their work may be nominated by other scholars. A full copy of the article should be submitted in e-copy, in pdf format, together with the completed application/nomination form, downloadable here. Completed applications should be sent to the Award Committee at this address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Timeframe

For the submission of articles published between 30 September 2017 and 30 September 2019:

Application closing date for the 2020 Award: 30 September 2019

Announcement of award winner: 31 March 2020

For more information, visit https://www.jiaotongbakercentre.org/the-martha-cheung-award/