Heriot-Watt University and Edinburgh University are pleased to announce this one and a half day event to bring together scholars working on ‘new speakers’ of minority languages in different parts of the world where traditional communities of speakers are being eroded. In these contexts, new speakers often emerge as a result of revitalization efforts and […]
Category: Research
Police academy: Interpreting research makes sense of investigative processes
A recent development in LINCS is the establishment of a Police Interpreting Research Group within the Centre for Translation & Interpreting Studies in Scotland (CTISS). LINCS was one of the first in Europe to offer postgraduate training in Public Service Interpreting (PSI). PSI covers all parts of the public sector, prominently including contexts like police […]
Language Rights … and Wrongs
Should it be a human right to be able to use your native language wherever you are? Should states protect linguistic minorities, even when resources are right? What is the best strategy to help people see that linguistic diversity is a good thing? These were just some of the subjects covered in a talk by […]
What that means to me: The Tireless and Tiresome Search for Meaning
Part II Should empathic responses be an expected skill of the community interpreter? As part of our development as interpreting professionals, we should actively seek to develop empathy for people and in our practice, display empathy – even to ourselves. Our emotional reactions to the people we work with are best not repressed but considered […]
What that means to me: The Tireless and Tiresome Search for Meaning
Part I “This is a conservation area and so there’s no bins or double-glazing.” This is just one of the many sentences spoken to me since moving to Edinburgh two months ago where I had no idea what the person meant. And, mind you, English is my first language! What that means to me: I […]
More Stuff We Should Probably Know, But Don’t
The last post in this series provided a nice list of questions that are still unanswered in translation and interpreting research. Admittedly, some of those questions were not of the kind that professionals might deal with each day. To counter this, here are a few questions that professionals will face. Once again, we are waiting […]
Stuff We Should Probably Know, But Don't
“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 […]
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 […]
LINCS and SBE Announce New Studentship
We’re delighted to announce that recent interviews have confirmed the offer of a PhD studentship to a new cross-disciplinary project which brings together expertise from LINCS and from Heriot-Watt’s School of the Built Environment (SBE). The studentship is one of a set offered under the University’s ‘Creativity, Design & Innovation’ theme earlier this year. The […]