“So, is interpreting really complicated enough to need research?” It’s an all too common question, especially from those who have never tried to do interpreting. For some reason, many people imagine that the work of translators and interpreters consists mainly of looking up words in bilingual dictionaries and stringing them together. If that is the […]
Category: Interpreting
Broken Britain: Blame the Interpreters?
“People in Britain who cannot speak English have cost the taxpayer almost £180m in interpreters over the past three years,” says a prominent report by Kevin Dowling and Mark Hookham in a recent Sunday Times article (23.10.11, page 7). In fact, the topic is considered so important by the Sunday Times that it also gets […]
Inside IPCITI 2011
One of the perks of doing research is that occasionally you have the chance to visit exotic places to attend conferences. Other times, the conference comes to you. That’s what happened last weekend, when a selection of PhD students and staff from Heriot-Watt attended the International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI) at Edinburgh […]
Public Engagement in LINCS
Universities across the UK are being strongly encouraged to do more work which takes their research and scholarship out of the classroom and into the wider world. We may not all get to be Professor Brian Cox, but there are actually a huge number of ways in which LINCS already undertakes a great of this […]
Changing the Public Face of Languages
What do a Glaswegian interpreter, a grandmother called Bo and a UK government department all have in common? For one reason or another, all have helped language to make the headlines in the past few years. Whether it is debates over government spend on court interpreting or funding for endangered languages or even a conference […]