“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 […]
News
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 […]
Research into multimedia translation: is it socially useful?
Dr Raquel de Pedro will be presenting a paper at the Points of View in Language and Culture Conference which will take place in the lovely city of Krackow on the 14 and 15 October. Her paper is based on the findings of a project called “Multimodality in translation: Steps towards socially useful research” which […]
New Speakers of Minority Languages: A Dialogue
In many parts of Europe, traditional communities of minority language speakers are being eroded as a consequence of increased urbanization and economic modernization. While native speaker communities are dying out, at the same time, “new speakers” of these languages are emerging. To a considerable extent this trend is as a result of more supportive language […]
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 […]
lifeinlincs
This blog is written by the members of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University. Here, you will find news about life in LINCS, key events that are taking place, new research developments, and our reflections about the fascinating world of language and how it shapes our lives.