Welcoming the new members of the Climate Change team

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Marcus Müller from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto from the University of Torino (Italy) have kindly agreed to join CASS Changing Climate project, led by Professor John Urry.

They both will have a lot to contribute to the project. Their experience and language skills will allow us to broaden the project’s scope and also examine the discourses around climate change issues in German and Italian newspapers.

Dr. Marcus Müller is a senior lecturer in German linguistics at the Department of German in the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also an associate member of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) and a teaching fellow of the Heidelberg Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Paderborn and Düsseldorf as well as at the universities of Tashkent, Budapest and Beijing. Dr. Marcus Müller is the founder and spokesman for the German-Chinese graduate network “Sprachkulturen – Fachkulturen” and the “Language and Knowledge” Graduate Platform (http://en.sprache-und-wissen.de/). His research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, grammatical variation, language and social roles, language and art. You can find more about him at http://www.gs.uni-heidelberg.de/sprache02/mitarbeiter/mueller/index.html

Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto is research fellow in English Language and Translation at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Torino. She is also a member of the Environmental Humanities International Research Group. Her research interests include translation studies, political discourse and environmental discourse. In her work, the contrastive analysis of texts in different languages (translated or comparable) is employed as a tool for critical discourse analysis.

Corpus Pragmatics in Translation Studies – call for papers

We welcome papers for a new volume to be published following UCCTS4 in the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics series (Springer) edited by Jesús Romero-Trillo.

The editors of the volume – Jesús Romero-Trillo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Richard Xiao (Lancaster Univeristy) – seek papers on the applications of pragmatics to translation studies that implement advanced methodologies based on corpus linguistics. The interest of the volume is to present the recent developments of pragmatic theories in their broadest sense (cognitive, social, linguistic, intercultural, etc.) vis-à-vis the growing possibilities of corpus linguistics in translation studies. The topics of interest for the volume include all aspects of translation and interpreting studies. The suggested themes, however, should not be considered as limitations, and papers that go beyond or outside of these themes are also welcome. If you wish to contribute to this volume, please submit a title, a 500-word abstract in which you outline your method, data, and findings, together with your name, affiliation and contact information to the editors, by January 31, 2014.

If accepted, your full paper will be expected to be 7,000-9,000 words in length, excluding citations and appendices. Final deadline after acceptance will be August 31, 2014.

Please make a submission via email to jesus.romero@uam.es and r.xiao@lancaster.ac.uk with the subject line “Corpus Pragmatic in Translation Studies Submission”.

A new research associate has joined CASS

A new research associate, Dr Xianyao Hu, has recently been appointed in the Department of Linguistics and English Language to work on the CASS project “Comparable and Parallel Corpus Approaches to the Third Code”, led by Dr Richard Xiao the PI of the project.

Dr Hu is Professor of Translation Studies from Southwest University in China. He was awarded his PhD in Translation Studies in 2006 at East China Normal University, specializing in Corpus-based Translation Studies. Since 2004, Dr Hu has published a range of research articles and a book on corpus-based empirical studies of Translational Norms and Universals. In 2008-2010, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Beijing Foreign Studies University on a project based on a sizable bidirectional parallel corpus between Chinese and English. He taught as a teaching assistant on the MA Programme of English-Chinese Translating and Interpreting at University of Salford in 2005-2006, and spent a year as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar working in a corpus project at University of California Los Angeles in 2011-2012.

Dr Hu joined CASS on 1st November 2013, the official start date of the project. He will work with Dr Richard Xiao on the UK component of the international project, which is collaboratively undertaken by Lancaster University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and jointly funded by ESRC in the UK and the Research Grant Council in Hong Kong.