Translation and Interpreting Studies Research
T&I (translating and interpreting) studies is a multi-faceted inter-discipline where different fields interact and spark ideas from each other – such as linguistics and literature, culture, identity and professional studies, psychology and philosophy.
Among the key interests for our community of staff and student researchers are:
- Literary translation
- Professional translation and interpreting
- Translation, language and culture
- Translation, society and identity
- Translator and interpreter training and assessment
In today’s world, trade and culture are becoming ever more globalised. This gives an ever-growing role for translating and interpreting. Hence our main research purpose is quite simply to find out more about how translating and interpreting works – in the professional, the language and the cultural sense.
Professionally, our research tackles cutting-edge questions of what translators and interpreters do and believe, such as:
- What does ‘professionalism’ and ‘expertise’ mean for literary and non-literary translators, and for interpreters?
- How do translators translate and interpreters interpret?
- How do their skills and strategies vary with different types of text?
- How can translators and interpreters be trained and assessed?
As well as expanding academic knowledge in this field, our findings feed directly into our translator and interpreter training programmes.
We work in a wide range of languages – for example, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin and Spanish. This enables us to focus on issues involving these languages’ users, such as:
- With Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, (the main language group of former Yugoslavia), we explore the role of translating in nation-building, conflict and reconstruction.
- Since Chinese-English t&i is a huge and growing professional field, mapping this field is crucially important to the world economy and world culture.
- With German and Latin, we examine the role of translation in medieval culture.
Socioculturally, we explore issues of contact and communication which are crucial to the modern world, such as:
- How translators communicate but also shape images of other peoples, times and cultures.
- How translation interacts with other social and cultural processes – for example, identity and ideology; the global spread of religious ideas; or the struggle between monoethnicity and cultural diversity as a basis for society.
The School of Modern Languages is a Corporate Member, Institute of Translation & Interpreting
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