[] I am very happy to
find out the note which was taken down at the FIT 6th Asian
Translators’ Forum (Macau
University, 6-8 November
2010).
Here recommend one
of them which written by Prof. Jeremy Munday (University of Leeds, UK),
the title is: Research and publication in translation studies--a few words.
Here is a brief
introduction to Prof. Jeremy Munday:
BA (Cambridge)
PGCE (Sheffield)
Dip Trans (Institute of Linguists)
M Ed. (Liverpool)
PhD (Bradford)
Research Interests
Translation studies, including stylistics, discourse and
text analysis in translation; systemic functional linguistics (especially
evaluation and appraisal theory); ideology in the translation of literary and
political works and speeches, with special reference to Spain and Latin
America; corpus-based translation studies, including contrastive studies of
lexical patterns and semantic prosody; cognitive translation studies; the
history of literary translators in the twentieth century. I collaborate in
teaching and research with the Centre for Translation Studies and co-supervise
many students working on translation into Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Malay. I
am also a qualified and experienced translator from Spanish and French into
English.
Major Publications
Evaluation in Translation: A study of critical points in
translator decision-making, under contract to
Routledge for publication in 2012.
‘What can translation theory
tell us about translation? Interdisciplinary potential, constraints, and
some suggestions’, in Martin Burke and Melvin Richter (eds) The Translation of Political Concepts,
Leiden:
Brill, forthcoming.
‘Looming large: A cross-linguistic
analysis of semantic prosodies in comparable reference corpora’, in Alet
Kruger, Kim Wallmach and Jeremy Munday (eds) Corpus-Based Translation Studies, London
and New York:
Continuum, in press (due for publication in summer 2011).
‘Translation studies’, in Yves
Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds) Handbook of Translation Studies, Amsterdam
and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, in press (due for publication August 2010).
‘Ideology’, in Mona Baker and
Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2nd edition, 2008. (co-authored with Peter Fawcett).
Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and applications, London and New York: Routledge, 1st edition, 2001.
(Has appeared in translation in Greek, Korean and Chinese and Croatian).
'Email, emilio or mensaje de
correo electrónico? The Spanish language fight for purity in the new
technologies', in: Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers (eds) Into and Out of English: For better,
for worse, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters (2005), pp. 57-70
'A comparative analysis of
evaluation in Spanish and English World Cup reports', Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, (Tenerife), 49 (2004): 117-133
‘Systems in Translation: A
Systemic Model for Descriptive Translation Studies', in: Theo Hermans
(ed.) Crosscultural
Transgressions. Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and
Ideological Issues, Manchester:
St Jerome
(2002), pp. 76-92
‘Linguistic
criticism as an aid to the analysis of literary translation’, in Kinga
Klaudy, Janos Kohn and Mary Snell-Hornby (eds), Transferre Necesse Est,
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Current Trends
in the Study of Translation and Interpreting, Sept 1996, Budapest:
Scholastica, 1997.
Picador Book of Latin American Short Stories, translation of 15 of the stories in the collection, edited by
Julio Ortega and Carlos Fuentes, London:
Picador/Macmillan, 1998
Memories of Altagracia, translation
of the novel by Salvador Garmendia (Venezuela),
Peter Owen: London,
a Unesco representative work.
MODL5109M Spanish-English Translation
(Module Co-ordinator at MA level)
MODL5001M Methods and Approaches to
Translation and Interpreting
Postgraduate
Research Supervision
Translation Studies
Discourse and text analysis of
translation
Cognitive and corpus-based
translation studies
Translation and ideology
The translation of Latin American
writing and politics
The history of translators in the
twentieth century
Current PhD student topics are: a corpus-based analysis of
metaphor in US English/Mexican Spanish financial texts; names and cultural
references in Chick Lit translated into Spanish and Italian; the English
translations of Naghib Mahfouz’s works; Arabic-Malay translation; the
translation of the Harry Potter books into Arabic; reader response to
culture-bound references in Arabic translations of DH Lawrence.
Ok,here is his suggestion for translation studies:
First of all, I am
very sorry not to be able to attend the conference in Macau
in person, but I wish you every success in the organization and in the
intellectual dialogues on translation. I also thank you for allowing me to send
in a few comments for this salon. I hope these comments are useful.
Research in
translation studies has increased hugely in the past decade or so. When I first
started working in the field in the early 1990s the number of publications was
relatively limited. The number is now very much higher and, I would suggest, of
a generally higher quality. When I revised and update my Introducing
Translation Studies I am struck by the difficulty in choosing selected readings
and illustrative examples. Translation studies has broadened, to encompass
rapid developments in technology (such as corpus linguistics, localization
tools, screen translation…) and in theories from other interdisciplinary areas
(such as sociology, critical theory, systemic functional linguistics). It has
also deepened, to include some extremely detailed and complex experimental
investigation, such as the corpus linguistics research and applications in my
Centre in Leeds. It has encompassed new and
previously marginal forms of translation, including various types of adaptation
and interlingual and intralingual translation, such as audio description and
retranslation. And, very excitingly, translation studies has grown internationally
and has begun to shift its focus away from European languages, contexts and
conceptions of translation. This is illustrated by the success of the Asian
translators’ Forum.
My advice for
young researchers is that they should choose a topic that excites them, they
should try to keep to a regular work schedule and they should also keep to a
manageable focus. One of the biggest problems that beginning PhD students
encounter, for example, is their attempt to coveer too much ground. At the same
time, students should be open-minded and gain a basic grounding in what
translation studies is so that they can place their research in the context of
other work. If they don’t do this, their studies may remain isolated and may
fail to achieve their full influence. Once the topic is focussed, the
students/researchers should use all the tools at their disposal to ensure that
they find, digest and critically evaluate the work that has already been done
by others and the gaps in the researches of online journals, follow-up of references
in key texts, and the experience of their mentors and peers. The best research
goes well beyond the basic and easily retrievable texts. It is the result of
original thinking, or re-thinking, sometimes creatively incorporating ideas
from other disciplines that are pertinent to translation. In short, it teaches
the reader something new and interesting, something that the reader was only
vaguely aware of or had not conceived in that particular way.
When it comes to
publication, have the right amount of confidence in your work, based on a
logical evaluation of its strengths and inevitable limitations. Do not claim to
have solved every problem, be sure to give due credit to others whose work you
have read or used. Show it to others (peers and mentors) for their advice, and
be ready to help them in turn. If you are confident it is a good piece of work,
target it carefully at a journal or publisher which tends to publish in that
particular field. Write clearly and concisely and follow the style-guide of the
publication.
But this is all
very prescriptive, and my last piece of advice is very different: each of us
can learn to find out own preferred way of studying and researching, whether it
be individually, in a close-knit team or in interdisciplinary collaborations
between instituations. We all wish to further our understanding of translation
as a product, process or phenomenon, and collectively we can help to further
this aim.