JRHE, the Journal of Research in Higher Education published by Babeș-Bolyai University, the QUALITAS Centre, invites submissions for the forthcoming special issue on the research, pedagogy and practice of translation and interpretation, due out in September 2022. JRHE is a peer-reviewed, open access journal http://jrehe.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/, that seeks to address and factor in the major challenges educators, researchers, trainers and trainers of trainers in the field are faced with in these accelerated global times.

As well as the changing professional communication patterns and policies manifesting themselves at this juncture in pandemic times, the volume sets out to engage the transformative forces impacting these academic subjects and the global language industry in the age of digital literacies and remote teaching. Fostering transdisciplinarity and multilingualism at the highest professional level in the language industry par excellence, the Department of Applied Modern Languages at BBU – a pioneering department in the country, marking its 30th anniversary in Higher Education in Romania– commissions state-of-the art contributions that cover the terrain of translation and interpretation studies.

Submission topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Advanced technology applications in the pedagogies of CI and TS;
• Multimodality in T & I (audiovisuality, video-gaming, subtitling et al);
• Remote interpreting, I&T teaching and re-speaking;
• The cultural and ‘geo’ turn in translation studies;
• Posthumanities and translation and interpretation practice;
• Translation and interpretation and their territorial politics/policies;

Deadline for abstracts: 30 June

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Several relatively new forms of translation have emerged following the advent of the participatory Web 2.0. These include solicited forms of translation such as translation crowdsourcing used by for-profit companies like Facebook or Twitter. There are also other forms of translation like machine translation or self-translation occurring on social media platforms, especially on newer representatives like Instagram or TikTok (Desjardins 2019). Translation crowdsourcing is also employed by non-profit organizations like TED or Kiva. While these companies or organizations recruit voluntary and unpaid translators, there are also several translation platforms such as Gengo or Unbabel which employ paid translation crowdsourcing at below market rates (Jiménez-Crespo 2021). Furthermore, these relatively new forms of translation also include a wide range of unsolicited and self-managed types of translation such as interlingual knowledge-sharing through Wikipedia (Jones 2017, 2019; McDonough Dolmaya 2015, 2017) or Yeeyan (Yang 2020) as well as the various types of online fan translations such as fansubbing, fandubbing, scanlations or translation hacking (Fabbretti 2019; Lee 2009; Orrego-Carmona 2019; Muñoz Sánchez 2007, 2009).

Even though these more recent phenomena and the communities involved in the translation process have caught the attention of Translation Studies scholars and have been studied from multiple perspectives, two lacunae have been identified by Zwischenberger (2021). Firstly, there is no consensus as to what constitutes the most appropriate top-level concept for these translation phenomena. Several candidates are currently being used concomitantly, including online collaborative translation, voluntary translation, user-generated translation (UGT), and social online translation, to name but a few. Secondly, research into the ethical implications of these online translation practices is lacking in depth and number. Ethical issues are only rarely addressed directly in the relevant literature and if so they are addressed only in passing. The special issue will tackle these two lacunae, with the groundwork having already been laid by our one-day symposium Translation on and over the Web: Disentangling its conceptual uncertainties and ethical questions, held in November 2021.

Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2022

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The Centre for Translation Studies is seeking a University assistant (prae doc) in the field of Transcultural Communication (Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zwischenberger) with a focus on online collaborative translation (e.g. Translation Crowdsourcing, Fansubbing, Fandubbing, Scanlation, Translation hacking). These types of online collaborative translation are investigated as specific forms of transcultural communication where both the translation process as well as its product are characterized by particular hybridity. The Centre for Translation Studies (ZTW) at the University of Vienna, Austria is one of 20 academic units (faculties and centres) of the University of Vienna. In addition to the area of teaching (transcultural communication, translation studies, translation and interpreting education in 14 languages, etc.), the Centre conducts research in several key research areas. Cutting-edge research is conducted by professors, habilitated staff members, predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers, senior lecturers and many more. More than 120 lecturers teach translation-related subjects to about 3,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students.

The employment relationship is initially limited to 1.5 years and is automatically extended to a total of 4 years, unless the employer submits a declaration of non-renewal after a maximum of 12 months.

Deadline for applications: 1 May 2022

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The Department of Translation sets out to provide an education in bilingual and cross-cultural studies which nourishes graduates with competence in Chinese and English as well as a capacity to think critically and independently.  One of its central features is the equal emphasis on translation as a profession and as an academic discipline.  Another feature is the importance attached to the socio-cultural environment of the Chinese and English languages.  The appointee will be required to teach courses in one or more of the following areas: Translation Theory and Practice, Computer-aided Translation, Corporate Communication, Conference Interpreting, Media Translation, and Legal Translation.  Appointees are expected to have excellent command of Chinese and English, and experience of teaching Translation (both theory and practice) or Interpreting will be an advantage.

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Review of applications will start from 10 April 2022 and continue until the posts are filled.

The University of Portsmouth is an ambitious institution with a track record of success. One of only four universities in the south east of England to achieve a Gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework and ranked in the top 150 in the Times Higher Young University World Rankings.

The University of Portsmouth is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Translation Studies to teach in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics. This work will be at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Teaching will be both face-to-face and online.

Applicants must be able to contribute to a range of translation modules, and also the research profile of the School. Expertise in translation technologies is essential. An ability to contribute to the teaching of translation in the one of the following combinations is an advantage:

• Arabic/English

• French into English

• English into Japanese

We are looking for a talented individual with a strong commitment to high quality teaching. The successful candidate will have excellent interpersonal skills, be student-centred, and have experience of teaching, preferably across a range of levels. A knowledge of online/blended learning is essential, as is having experience of teaching CAT tools, MT post-editing and subtitling.

The School belongs to a long-established global community comprising students, staff and partner organisations. This provides an inclusive multi-cultural environment where all are welcomed.

For further information and an informal conversation please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Deadline for applications: 24 April 2022

Over the past 500 years, English has gone from a marginal language hardly spoken by anyone outside of England to a global lingua franca with speakers, native and non-native, all over the world. This has created situations of multilingualism both within countries where English is the main language and elsewhere, as many people who speak English on a regular basis are not native speakers, and the language itself has come into contact with other languages in the course of processes of colonisation, immigration, and globalisation. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these processes have broadened the contact zone of English, redefined its relations with the classical languages of humanist communication as well as with modern European languages (some of which have developed varieties outside Europe), and ultimately led to a questioning of the majority/minority-language binary. Literature and the verbal arts, be it to give a realistic description of the world or to experiment with language and form, have reflected, registered and contributed to such plurilingual practices. 

To give only a few examples, early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Dryden included words or pieces of dialogue in fashionable foreign languages (mostly Italian and French) in their plays, as did Sterne in Tristram Shandy with long passages in French and in Latin; George Eliot’s choice of headings for the chapters in Middlemarch testifies to her plurilingual reading skills; the translation practices of émigré writers such as Nabokov or Beckett rely on their plurilingual experiences, as do Nancy Huston’s choices of self-translation between English and French. Authors from multilingual backgrounds writing in English such as (to name but a few) Derek Walcott, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Salman Rushdie resort to forms of language mixing and switching. Multilingualism takes on new inflections for contemporary British poets such as Steve Ely, whose concept of xenoglossia incorporates foreign words, Old English and dialecticisms.

Evolutions in the status of English as a communication language in everyday lives and in artistic productions go hand in hand with evolutions in translation techniques and strategies, with the development of translation into English as a necessary means of worldwide communication as well as the acknowledgment of varied linguistic and cultural skills in target audiences. This is particularly striking in translations (dubbing or subtitling) of contemporary films and TV series which foreground multilingual (and multicultural) environments, such as Jane the Virgin, Unorthodox, Generations, and Derry Girls. Some film genres or series depict plurilingual characters, for example the protagonists in many Bollywood films, or Italian-American gangsters in The Godfather movies or Latino-American gangsters in Breaking Bad;  one could also think of westerns which stage multilingual encounters with Spanish-, French-speaking, or Native American characters. 

For contemporary artists such as Caroline Bergvall, whose installation and collected poems Meddle English bring together English, French and Middle English, multilingualism fuels a reflection on multimodality. Theatre (The Forbidden Zone by Katie Mitchell, Tous des Oiseaux by Wajdi Mouawad) also uses multilingualism as a way to experiment with contemporary modes of representation on stage.

More generally, traditional social constructs applied to analyse language use and cultural productions in translating, such as the “foreign/native” or the “source/target” opposition, are in need of redefinition. Likewise, the concept of lexical borrowing needs to be reexamined if English is considered a multilingual language from the start, with its elaboration relying on words and structures taken from Saxon, but also Latin and Romance languages – as the lexicographers (and the translators) from the Renaissance already knew.

This two-part conference welcomes both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the interplay between multilingualism and translation involving English as source or target language and at least one other language in works of literature, the performing arts and audio-visual productions, from the sixteenth century to the present. Multilingualism will be taken in the broad meaning of the co-presence of several languages within the same work, thus including neighbouring concepts such as heterolingualism, and such phenomena as code-switching and multi-ethnolects. Papers that combine methodologies from linguistics, literary/film studies and translation studies will be particularly appreciated.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the study of:

• Strategies of translation that deal with multilingual sources, or that turn monolingual sources into multilingual translated works
• Editions of texts with their translation(s)
• Cases in which the target language also features in the source
• Comparisons of translation strategies in various target languages for English sources
• The rendering of phonetic specificities in both text and performance
• The translation of metadiscursive comments/elements in multilingual contexts
• The specific issues raised by dubbing and subtitling/surtitling
• Multilingualism and forms of expanded / contrapuntal / prismatic translation
• The technologies developed/adapted to facilitate the translation of multilingual texts

The first part will take place at Université Paris Nanterre (30-31 March 2023), and will focus more specifically on literary works in print (and the issues related to translating and publishing multilingual texts) from the sixteenth century to the present. Keynote speaker: Dirk Delabastita (Université de Namur).

The second part will take place at Université de Lille (February/March 2024), and will focus more specifically on the performing arts, films and TV series (and the challenges set to translators by aural effects dependent on multilingualism). Keynote speaker: Charlotte Bosseaux (The University of Edinburgh).

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Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022

Authors are expected to submit papers discussing the use of terminology with
possible connotative or ideological implications, intentional or otherwise, in various
domains and in different communicative situations (intra‐ and interspecialist
communication, knowledge dissemination for didactic/pedagogical purposes,
popularization, etc.). Authors are invited to discuss one or more of the following
topics:
• the use of terminology with connotative or ideological implications or
intentions in different communicative situations
• the role of non‐experts (e.g., journalists) in fostering connotative and
ideological uses of terms resulting in terminology taking on connotative and
ideological undertones
• the role of collaborative work (e.g., editorial teams) in the development of
connotative and ideological terminology
• the role of metaphors in the creation of connotative and ideological
terminology
• the consequences of using connotative and ideological terminology in different
communicative situations
• the challenges posed by connotative and ideological terminology to
terminology representation and management
• terminology and political correctness in e.g., gender issues, woke culture, etc.
• the role of translation in assigning ideological significance to terminological
units

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Deadline for abstracts: 30 September 2022

We are looking for an inspiring translation researcher and lecturer to strengthen our newly established Master’s track Translation in Europe, a one-year degree programme that combines a theoretical approach with professional and academic skills (see https://www.rug.nl/(...)s/vertalen-in-europa). The position we offer combines research (40%) and teaching (60%), and will be situated within the chair group of Applied Linguistics.

We expect you to have in-depth knowledge of translation studies, working experience as a translator (preferably, English-Dutch but other languages are welcome), as well as experience in (translation) teaching at academic level. In addition, you are familiar with up-to-date translation technology.

Your primary task will be to conduct research and develop your line of investigation in the field of translation studies. In addition, you will be responsible for teaching research-driven translation seminars and to supervise internships and theses in this area as well as to become involved in PhD supervision. Depending on your specific expertise, you may also be involved in other degree programmes of the Faculty of Arts. You will also be expected to take on administrative and organisational duties.

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Deadline for applications: 18 April 2022

This collection of essays represents the first of its kind in exploring the conjunction of translation and social media communication, with a focus on how these practices intersect and transform each other against the backdrop of the cascading COVID-19 crisis. The contributions in the book offer empirical case studies as well as personal reflections on the topic, illuminating a broad range of themes such as knowledge translation, crisis communications, language policies, cyberpolitics and digital platformization. Together they demonstrate the vital role of translation in the trust-based construction of global public health discourses, while accounting for the new medialities that are reshaping the conception, experience and critique of translation in response to the cultural, political and ecological challenges in the post-pandemic world.

Written by leading scholars in translation studies, media studies and literary studies, this volume sets to open up new conversations among these fields in relation to the global pandemic and its aftermath.

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The past decade has seen a substantial rise in research publications focused more and more on the issue of translation tasks and projects having to tackle with texts that are not limited to a single language, dialect, or sociolect (Beseghi 2017, Ranzato and Zanotti 2018, Pérez and de Higes 2019, Rebane and Junkerjürgen 2019, to mention but a few). In other words, they display, and play with, the inclusion of words or phrases that do not belong to the standard language norm of the main language the text is composed in. The decade(s) before that required that such studies be introduced by a justification of the importance or relevance of language variation within texts (e.g., Sternberg 1981, Delabastita and Grutman 2005, Bleichenbacher 2008, Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011). This is no longer necessary nor is it accurate to claim that there is a woeful lack of studies on this topic. So, the question now is how far have we come exactly in our progress towards including this kind of sensitivity in the mainstream of translation studies, both theoretically and in the applied domain of professional practice and academic training?

How is (yet another) dichotomy—of foreign vs. non-foreign—called into question by multilingual phenomena, such as creoles and code-switching, which are not necessarily based on the same factors as national borders, especially if we take into account multilingual communities and co-official languages within a given country? 

This Special Issue aims to address this question by accepting submissions that deal with it from different angles such as the ones suggested here but not limited to them:

• Are translators proficient in all the languages of a multilingual fictional text (e.g., a novel or television series), and do they need to be?
• How is multilingualism in fiction an element of an author’s style and how is multilingualism dealt with accordingly?
• What strategies are used by translators in rendering scripted multilingualism and how they are affected by the habitual strategies involved in translation practices?
• How have stereotypes (of character portrayal, conversational patterns or topics, or situations or events) developed and changed regarding the strategic use of foreign languages, dialects and non-native use of languages?
• What are the practices and trends of using and rendering invented languages (e.g., as spoken by aliens from other planets or fantasy worlds)?
• Are translations becoming more multilingual or linguistically diverse and, if so, by what means?
• What genres and text-types are more affected by multilingualism, more problematic or innovative in translation?
• In what aspects can / must we revise traditional theoretical approaches in the light of discoveries made in the area of multilingual translation? What about less traditional approaches, such as taking LGBTiQ+ studies/factors into account, or racial discourse, etc.?
• To what extent is lingua franca a factor, and directionality, as in the distinction between from English vs. into English, for instance, or between languages that are not widespread on a global level?
• Are there significant differences depending on whether the texts are written or audiovisual, i.e., mode and multimodality?
• What are the relations between translation, multilingualism, pseudotranslations, creoles, code-switching, slang, non-native speech and other manifestations of sociolinguistic variation?
• What historical periods can be meaningfully sketched both in the use of multilingualism in film, television, and video on demand, and the way they were and have been translated? What are the key characteristics of each period and the key factors of change from one period to another?
• How have the researchers’ interests in the field of translation studies been sparked, what is the focus of their research and how has it evolved? What other aspects of translation has multilingualism been related to?
• How is multilingualism tackled in machine translation, artificial intelligence, templates for translators, and post-editing practices?

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 12 October 2022

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