Today, over 100 languages are spoken in Scotland. While English dominates trade, education and politics; the future of Scotland’s other “native” languages: Gaelic, Scots and BSL remains uncertain. As a result of immigration and growing international economic and cultural links, newer language communities have also found a welcoming home in Scotland. Against this backdrop, Heriot-Watt […]
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Best of Frenemies? Machine and Human Translation
It was all so simple in theory. With enough computing power, a handful of smart linguistics boffins, a few computer scientists and enough time, human translators would be as obsolete as punch card programming. No matter the text, no matter the subject, Machine Translation (MT) would give you a word perfect version every time in […]
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 […]
Deaf in the Story
Thanks to all who participated in the ‘Deaf in the Story’ knowledge exchange event organized by Heriot-Watt University’s BSL:UPTAKE project at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh yesterday. Wasn’t it great? We’re grateful to the Edinburgh Beltane project http://www.edinburghbeltane.net/ for the prize which enabled us to set up this event. We took the event to […]
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 […]
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 […]
European Forum of Sign Language Interpreters
Several members of LINCS staff recently attended the annual European Forum of Sign Language Interpreters conference, held this year in Salerno, Italy. Last year’s EFSLI conference was held in Glasgow and featured LINCS’ Chair of Translation & Interpreting, Graham Turner, as a keynote presenter (GHT 2010 EFSLI keynote). The character of EFSLI reflects that of […]