The Centre for Translation Studies provides teaching in 14 languages and research in a broad range of core areas of translation and interpreting. The advertised prae-doctoral position offers an exciting international working environment and the opportunity to develop innovative research focuses in literary translation.
Duration of employment: 4 year/s

Extent of Employment: 30 hours/week
Job grading in accordance with collective bargaining agreement: §48 VwGr. B1 Grundstufe (praedoc) with relevant work experience determining the assignment to a particular salary grade.Job Description:
Participation in research, teaching and administration - Participation in research projects / research studies - Participation in publications / academic articles / presentations - We expect the successful candidate to sign a doctoral thesis agreement within 12-18 months. - Participation in teaching and independent teaching as defined by the collective agreement - Supervision of students - Involvement in the organisation of meetings, conferences, symposiums - Involvement in the department's administration as well as the administration of teaching and research activities

Profile:
Completed MA in relevant field (translation studies) - Minimum of three working languages - Excellent command of written and spoken German and English - IT user skills - Ability to work in a team - Interest in literary translation - Initiative, openness, creativity


Desirable additional qualifications are experience/interest in archival work - Basic experience in research methods and academic writing 

For more information, click here

Top quality research requires outstanding methodological skills. That is why the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University will jointly organize a Summer School on “Methods in Language Sciences” from 13 until 17 July 2020.

This Summer School is targeted at both junior and senior researchers and offers eight multi-day modules on various topics, ranging from quantitative to qualitative methods and covering NLP, eye-tracking and survey design as well as specific tools such as PRAAT and ELAN. All lecturers are internationally recognized experts with a strong research and teaching background.

Because the modules will partly be held in parallel sessions, participants have to choose one or two modules to follow (see the Programme for details). There is no prerequisite knowledge or experience, except for Module 2 (on Advanced statistical methods with R).

In addition, Jürgen Van De Walle of Cerence Inc. will give a keynote lecture on Wednesday, 15th July 2020 at 17:30 (topic to be announced). This will be followed by a social event in the historical center of Ghent city.

This is your opportunity to take your methodological skills for research in (applied) linguistics, translation or interpreting studies to the next level. We are looking forward to meeting you in Ghent!

For more information, click here

The second edition of the UMAQ conference seeks to explore the ways in which the different stakeholders involved in the MA/AVT value chain (such as researchers, industry, policy-makers and organisations of end-users) tackle the pressing and complex issue of quality.

The conference will be followed by a free multiplier event of the EASIT project on 18 September afternoon. Information about the multiplier event will be provided at a later stage.

Possible topics of interest
Within the context of Media Accessibility and Audiovisual Translation, possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical issues and the theoretical foundation of quality
• Quality issues in specific modalities: dubbing, respeaking, subtitling, audio description, etc.
• Quality in standards, guidelines and regulations
• The human factor in the definition and assessment of quality
• Quality in/and technology: machine translation, automatic subtitles, automatic audio description, clean audio, technologies for access services, etc.
• The role of MA/AVT stakeholders (industry, end-users, regulators, etc.) in the definition and evaluation of quality
• Quality issues in live events, museums, videogames, immersive environments, etc.
• Quality and reception studies
• Metrics for measuring quality
• One-size-fits-all approaches versus context-dependent approaches to quality
• Interdisciplinary approaches to quality
• Intersectionality in the definition and assessment of quality
• Pedagogical issues: quality in education and training, the role of education and training in current and future accounts of quality, the need for and role of new professional profiles and their potential impact on quality issues in AVT/MA
• Quality issues in relation to different end users’ groups: children, younger adults, the elderly, migrants, persons with disabilities, etc.

Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2020

For more information, click here

The Graduate Student Conference on Translation Studies serves as a forum that exhibits the robust relationship between translation studies and other academic disciplines and professional fields. This conference brings together graduate students and early-career postdoctoral researchers united by a common interest in translation and interpreting.

This year, we welcome abstracts and panel proposals related to the topics of ethics and justice, pertaining to any subfield of translation and interpreting studies, including literary, technical, and legal translation; theory and practice of interpretation; translation history; and translation and interpreting technology. Possible themes include (but are not limited to): interpretation and migrant justice; the ethics and ideological implications of translation choices (both in terms of what we translate and how we go about it); translation as activism; translators’ and interpreters’ agency; community interpretation, family interpretation, and other pro bono modes of interpreting; ethics of medical interpreting; ethical and economic impact of machine translation; corporate translation and accountability; considerations relating to subjectivity, cultural difference, and collective identity; translation pedagogy; access to translation and interpreting services; politics of literary translation; publishing and visibility; gendered disparities in the profession; and so forth. We welcome comparative studies, case studies, corpus studies, argumentative essays, and any other methodology relevant to translation and interpreting studies.

Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2020

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Language and law are two intertwined areas of study whose connections are still opening new windows across disciplines. With the objective of enhancing an interdisciplinary reflection among researchers and practitioners in these domains, Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law will foreground the applications of jurilinguistic approaches to the analysis of law and language. This conference will gather professionals in both fields who are interested in discovering the linguistic nature of legal (including political and sociolegal) challenges, and the legal implications of (new) multilingualism(s).

We will promote a closer understanding among professionals and researchers in legal disciplines of the work done by linguists and translators, against the background of the increased interest for their tools and insights into the scientific study of languages among lawyers. On the grounds of increasing collaborations between of language and law professionals and researchers, bilingual and multilingual programmes in international law are being implemented, linguists and translators increase their demands for specialized legal training, corpus linguistic tools are being used in the legal interpretation of jurisprudence, growing cooperation among societies triggers the creation of supranational structures, legal relationships become globalized… New fields for both language and law are emerging as societies develop new ties and needs across the globe, demanding cross-disciplinary research designs, new tenets and increasingly complex methods.

The symposium Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law aims to provide a meeting point for professionals and researchers interested in the intersection of language and law from different disciplines, including translation and interpreting studies, sociology, anthropology, criminology and, indeed, law and linguistics. The purpose is not only to identify progress and key insights into this hybrid field, but also to explore new areas of study and/or research. 

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2020

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Terminology as a research discipline has yet to achieve a well-grounded position among other disciplines. Nonetheless, the number of specialists dealing with it is constantly rising. Among them, besides terminologists sensu stricto, are theorists and educators of translation, researchers interested in language, translators etc. Moreover, tools used in terminological research are very diverse. We would like to open a multidisciplinary and a multilingual discussion on whether we can – and we should – talk about boundaries of and in terminology.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 Jan 2020

For more information, click here

This year, the main focus of the conference is “Translation Studies in the Era of Digital Humanities”. We hope that the conference will bring together researchers and translators, academia and students, practitioners in language services and technologies and language policy makers and will become a forum for promoting dynamic and constructive debate, networking and research cooperation.

The fourth international scientific conference “Meaning in Translation: Illusion of Precision” is aimed at exploring themes from the theoretical and practical perspectives covering a wide scope of topics:

• Terminology standardization and harmonization;
• Pragmatic, semantic and grammatical aspects of meaning in translation;
• Translation of sacred, legal, poetic, promotional and scientific and technical texts.

Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2020

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Decolonising university curricula has made international headlines in recent years. From the Rhodes Must Fall movement, to campaigns within universities to diversify reading lists, university departments have integrated new teaching practices that seek to both acknowledge and challenge the legacies of colonialism. Some UK universities have begun to recognise how they profited from the slave trade and have made (not uncontroversial) plans for restorative justice. Given its intrinsic relationship with the history of colonialism and its aftermath, Modern Languages – and the multilingualism upon which it relies – has been at the centre of debates about reforming research practices across universities. Scholars such as Alison Phipps, and research funded by the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ theme, have led the way in deploying creative and self-reflexive methods to acknowledge the uneven power relations that are implicit in the way we teach and learn languages. 

While research agendas in the field have begun to embrace change, it is far less clear how the Modern Languages teaching landscape has been transformed in recent years. If scholars have questioned how imperial and colonial forms of knowledge-making impact upon their research, what opportunities and challenges have arisen when integrating de-colonial research into materials and methodologies for teaching? 

The aim of this conference is to explore, examine and disseminate practices from within university language departments, sharing ideas about existing knowledge and practices of attempts to decolonize Modern Languages curricula in the UK and beyond. 

Deadline for submissions: 31 January

Please submit a title, 200-word abstract and short bio to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) invites everyone interested in machine translation, and translation-related tools and resources ― developers, researchers, users, translation and localization professionals and managers ― to participate in this conference. If you envisage an information world in which language barriers become less visible to the information consumer, submit a paper on the topic that drives you and your work. Driven by the state of the art, the research community will demonstrate their cutting-edge research and results, and professional MT users in the language industry will provide insight into successful MT implementation in business scenarios. Translation studies scholars and translation practitioners are also invited to share their first-hand MT experience, which will be addressed during a special track.

Deadline for submissions: 6 March 2020

For more information, click here

FACING THE FUTURE – TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY

Glendon College, York University (Toronto) – March 14, 2020 

Keynote speaker: Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University

Into the second decade of the 21^st century, technology continues to play an increasing role in translation processes and translator environments. What is translatable or not translatable through the mediation of machines is a central question as we head into the era of neural translation and AI. At the same time other questions emerge: are the existing models of collaborative translation, crowdsourcing, machine translated corpora, and cloud-based CAT tools leading us towards a new era of multi-modal plurality or to a fragmented dystopia where quality becomes a casualty? Is the interaction of human and machine in present and future translation ecologies a harbinger of an enlightened posthumanism or a problematic process that favours disembodied networks, algorithmic decision-making, and unsustainable growth in a time of runaway climate change and environmental degradation? This year’s graduate student conference will address what Minako O’Hagan (2019) describes as a kind of quantum entanglement, the link between human and machine, a crucial issue for our century.

Deadline for submissions: 15 January 2020

For more information, click here