TEACHING

This graduate seminar course, offered in English, explores some of the contemporary research trends in translation studies, with a special focus on multilingual, minoritized, migrant, European/EU, and technology contexts. Their translation practices and conceptual frameworks, guided by the specificities of their social and political situations and histories, allow us to rethink translational linguistic and cultural transfer in all its complexity. Students examine the ways that the European Union implements its multilingual policies and translation strategies in order to encourage representative and participatory democracy. They also explore the dynamics that influence communication and translation practices in other linguistically diverse environments, in particular those of minoritized and endangered languages-cultures — with a special focus on Indigenous, migrant, and Romani contexts. A number of factors contribute to linguistic-cultural (in)stability: economics; warfare; geopolitics; sociocultural and linguistic traditions and habits; migration; demographics; political and institutional ideologies. In our rapidly transforming contemporary world, the forces challenging us are many: globalization, social inequalities, economic and climatic unsustainability, political governance, technological automation and artificial intelligence. To understand them critically is to begin to re-envision future directions for our human trajectory. As a vital means of communication across geographical and digital boundaries, and rich in the experience of negotiating difference, translation will continue to have a significant role to play.

*Offered as FTRA 603/FTRA 553 Translation and Socio-Political Contexts in 2022 and 2023

This graduate/undergraduate seminar course, offered in English, considers the practices that have been emerging from the convergence of contemporary technologies, the multilingual Web, the digital world, and translation. While translation is one of the oldest communication practices in the world, it is also very much a product of its times. Students examine the various aspects and issues that the digital world brings to the translation landscape, and vice versa. On the one hand, flows of digital information and communication move through technologies across borders in our globalizing world. On the other hand, these digital flows collide with geographical and political boundaries, forcing diverse stake­holders (governments, institutions, organizations, companies, civil society) to deal with physical borders and concepts in a digital space and ecosystem. These trends, accelerated by myriad automated processes, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, have a major impact on translation as well - including machine translation. Taken together, information and communication technologies (ICTs), mobile devices, the internet and Web are an integral, ubiquitous, pervasive, and guiding force in today's cultures and societies. As our societies are increasingly transformed into multi-level digital societies, they challenge us to think beyond easily constructed categories or simplified concepts, and raise important questions. ‘Who' is accountable for ‘what' within the networked complexity of digital ecosystems? To what extent are automated agents and apps (including for machine translation) responsible for the content they generate? How does the increasing digitalization of our markets, economies, and notions of work affect social and political integration, government policies, governance, and citizenship? What is the role of AI ethics? Throughout this course, the multilingual context of the European Union serves as fertile ground for exploring and discussing these pertinent questions and issues.

*Offered as FTRA 668/568/418 “Web, Technologies, Translation” in 2022 and 2023

This graduate “special topics” seminar course, offered in English, presents a brief historical overview of the European Union, with emphasis on the basic principles of EU language policy and translation policy. It introduces the concepts that underpin the creation and development of the European Union and its role in the world today, including its relationship to Canada through the recent EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Students discuss the challenges of European multilingualism, and its management through the official language and translation policies implemented within the EU and its diverse institutions. Equal consideration is given to the role of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) and its support for minoritized languages and minority language translation. The complexities of a multilingual minority context are exemplified by the linguistic-translational situation of Romani peoples, who collectively comprise Europe's largest ethnic minority and reside as citizens within multiple nation-state borders, with literacy in different languages. By way of comparison with the Canadian context, students examine the various means by which translation is currently carried out in the multilingual EU context, e.g., by human and machine translation, and with internal and external translation services managed by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). Also examined are the “competence” skill-sets and levels that are provided by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the European Master's in Translation (EMT), among others. Lastly, students look at some of the digital transformations occurring within the contemporary EU, and consider e-democracy and AI initiatives in terms of the conceptual frameworks by which the European Union was founded.

*Offered as FTRA 698/598 “Special Topics: EU Language Policy and Translation Policy” in 2022 and 2023