by Ullrich Kockel “Sculpture, poetry, theatre – tell me,” says Didzis Meḷḳis, “does culture make any money?” We are sitting in an office in the Latvian Academy of Culture: the International Editor of Dienas bizness, the business section of Latvia’s leading daily broadsheet, and I, Professor of Culture and Economy at Heriot-Watt, having just delivered […]
Tag: research
Interpreting Needs Troublemakers
Author: Jonathan Downie I was in London on Saturday for a meeting and I got chatting to some fellow interpreters about the ways that research is challenging how we think about and practise interpreting. Here in LINCS, for example, Robyn Dean is arguing for us to fundamentally shift how we think about ethics, Penny Karanasiou […]
Introducing our new PhD students
Our vibrant PhD cohort is growing! Yanmei Wu has joined LINCS as a PhD student in Heritage and Performance. Her study will look into Chinese Kunqu Opera as intangible heritage, as well as its recent revival in 21st century China. Her supervisors are Dr Chris Tinker and Dr Kerstin Pfeiffer. Yanmei studied ethnomusicology at SOAS, […]
Why we all need double vision
by Jonathan Downie Why would an interpreter who was beginning to get valuable clients spend his non-working time reading research papers? Why would a translator who was learning to network start applying for conferences on Translation Studies rather than for a nice CAT tool presentation? Those are good questions. In fact, they are questions I […]
Irish in a multilingual world
In my previous post, I mentioned that new speakers of Irish are bringing the language into new contexts. While some speakers still try to model their Irish on what was traditionally spoken in the Gaeltacht, many others deliberately move away from this model. They break the rules of grammar and adopt hybridized forms of language. […]
An Irish of the future
A few weeks back I uploaded some information on the upcoming round of WorkGroup Meetings as part of the COST EU Action on “New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe“. The meetings which will be held at Heriot-Watt between 6-7 March 2014. The project involves researchers from some 17 European countries. In the project we are interested in finding […]
New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe
The recent resignation of the Irish-language commissioner in Ireland, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, featured strongly in the Irish media just before Christmas. Irish is the official language of the Republic of Ireland. It is one of the only minority languages in Europe and perhaps in the world to have this level of official status. However, despite this apparent protection […]
Who's who in BSL at Heriot-Watt University
Welcome to the 4th BSL blog on lifelinlincs After the last three weeks where you have seen discussion of sign language-related topics, in the blog for this week we thought we would take the opportunity to do a profile of the BSL team at Heriot-Watt University – a who’s who of the ten members of […]
Events: BAAL Conference 2013
This year, the 46th Annual conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) will take place at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh from 5 – 7 September. The event is organised by the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) with Dr Bernadette O’Rourke as principal organiser. The local organising committee includes Ms. Rita McDade, Professor […]
Improving as an Interpreter: Research
This is the second post in our attempt to pull together ways that we can improve as translators and interpreters. This time, it would be good to concentrate on one specific area that interpreters have to deal with for each job: research. If anything, modern interpreters suffer from having too much information at their fingertips. […]