Professor Mona Baker

点击次数：3995 发布日期：2015-03-13 【打印此页】

Professor Mona Baker

Professor of Translation Studies

Address: Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies
School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
M13 9PL, UK
Phone: +44 (0)161 275 8125
email: mona.baker@manchester.ac.uk
Academia.Edu: http://manchester.academia.edu/MonaBaker

Research Specialisation

Translation and Conflic, Translation and War
Ethics in Translation Research and Translator/Interpreter Training
Application of Narrative Theory to Translation and Interpreting
Framing & Contextualization Processes in Translation and Interpreting
Activist Communities in Translation Studies (e.g. Babels, Tlaxcala, Translators for Peace, ECOS, etc.)
Corpus-based Translation Studies

My main research interest at the moment is examining the role played by translators and interpreters in mediating conflict. The underlying assumption of my work is that whoever undertakes it, and whatever form it takes, translation is never a by-product of social and political developments. It is part and parcel of the very process that makes these developments possible in the first place. Translation is also not innocent. It is not about "building bridges" or "enabling communication" as is commonly assumed, but about the active circulation and promotion of narratives. Morally speaking, it is neither inherently good nor inherently bad in itself - it depends on the nature of the narratives it promotes and in which it is embedded, and of course on the narrative location of the person assessing it.

In all types of conflict, but particularly in an international conflict such as the war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, translation is central to the ability of all parties to legitimize their version of events, their narratives. Since this type of conflict is played out in the international arena and cannot simply be resolved by appealing to local constituencies at home, each party to the conflict has to rely on various processes of translation to elaborate and promote a particular narrative. I am interested in studying the way in which translation functions in this context, including the selection of texts to be translated, the type of people involved in translating them (irrespective of whether they are professional translators), and the various agendas they serve. This includes researching the use of translation by powerful, well-funded institutions as well as its use by various groups of peace activists and humanitarian organisations with little or no funding and no access to major media outlets.

Related publications include Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge 2006), "Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community" (The Massachusetts Review, 2006), "Reframing Conflict in Translation" (Social Semiotics 2007), ''Resisting State Terror: Communities of Activist Translators and Interpreters'' (in press), 'Ethics of Renarration' (interview with Andrew Chesterman, to appear in Cultus), "Contextualization in Translator- and Interpreter-mediated Events" (Journal of Pragmatics) and "Narratives in and of Translation" (SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2005). A talk I gave at Fujian Normal University in China in 2006, entitled 'Translation as Renarration', summarises some of this work.

My second area of research interest is the use of corpora as a resource for studying various features of translation, including the distinctive nature of translated text and the distinctive styles of individual translators (see Baker 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, in press, Olohan and Baker 2000). The nature and pressures of the translation process are bound to leave traces in the language that translators (and interpreters) produce. Some of this patterning has been explained in terms of notions such as simplification (a tendency on the part of translators to simplify the language or message or both) and explicitation (the tendency to spell things out in translation, including - in its simplest form - the practice of adding background information). The kind of methodology available from corpus linguistics offers one of the most effective ways of capturing such distinctive features of translation, because it allows us to study a massive amount of text and identify global patterning that is difficult or impossible to capture through manual analyses. A corpus of translated text can also be used to study variation in the output of individual translators (as in Baker 2000, 2004), the impact of specific source languages on the patterning of the target language, the impact of text type on translation strategies, and various other issues which are of interest to both the translation scholar and the corpus linguist. For more details on this research area, browse the pages of the Translational English Corpus, the largest corpus of translated language anywhere in the world. TEC received funding from the British Academy in the past and continues to be housed at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.

Publications

Click the highlighted link to view a list of selected publications.

A copy of the introduction to Critical Readings in Translation Studies is available for download. You may also download a copy of 'Ethics of Renarration' here.

A copy of the introductory article to Ethics and the Curriculum can be downloaded here (scroll to bottom of page and click on Download).

Downloads

MP3: Recording - Translation as Rennaration (audio recording of a lecture in China)

MP3: Recording of two-hour workshop on the application of narrative theory to translation & interpreting, given by Professor Mona Baker in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 2009

Interview by Professor Xu Fangfu, 12 May 2008 (Video Recording, Manchester)

Interview by Dr Morven Beaton-Thome about 2nd edition of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation

Keynote address by Professor Mona Baker at the International Forum on Translation and Globalisation, 2011, Chengdu, China

Translating Political Texts: Textual and Paratextual Strategies of Renarration, 2011, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Visiting and Honorary Positions

Guest Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, 2008-2010

Member of the International Advisory Committee of the Translation Research and Instruction Program, Binghamton University, USA

Member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland

Wei Lun Distinguished Visiting Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006

Adjunct Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006-2010

Guest Professor, Southwest University, Chongqing, China, 2010

Distinguished Visiting Professor, South China Agricultural University, 2007-2010

Membership of Editorial and Advisory Boards

Indicative List

Ameriquests (USA), Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics (UK), Maghreb Journal of Cultural Studies and Translation, Across Languages and Cultures (Hungary), ESP Across Cultures (Italy), ' Ayn (Journal of the Saudi Association of Languages and Translation); Translation Café - Review of Contemporary Texts in Translation (Romania); MONTI - Monographs in Translation and Interpreting (Spain); Translation Quarterly (Hong Kong); Hermeneus (Spain), Translation Studies (Iran), Journal of Translation and Interpretation (Slovak Association for the Study of English); Journal of Translation Studies (Hong Kong), Translation Watch Quarterly (Australia).

Research Students

Completed Theses

Sara Laviosa-Braithwaite (1996)
The English Comparable Corpus (ECC): A Resource and a Methodology for the Empirical Study of Translation

Fotios Karamitroglou (1998)
Towards a Methodology for the Investigation of Norms in Audiovisual Translation: The Choice between Subtitling and Revoicing in Greece

Dorothy Kenny (1999)
Norms and Creativity: Lexis in Translated Text

Khalid Al-Shehari (2000)
The Semiotics and Translation of Advertising Texts: Conventions, Constraints and Translation Strategies, with Particular Reference to English and Arabic

Nihad Mansour (Thesis awarded by Alexandria University, with distinction, 2000)
Criteria for the Assessment of Literary Translation, with Special Reference to English Translations of Yusuf Idris

Keith Harvey (2001)
Translating the Queens' English: Parodic Femininity in Fictional Representations of Gay Talk: A Study of French Representations of Late 1970s American Gay Fiction

Waleed Al-Amri (2002)
Semiotics, Translation and the Press

Gabriela Saldanha (2002)
A Corpus-Based Study of Gender Performance in Translation

Pilar Orero (2003)
The Translation of Nonsense with Reference to the Works of Edward Lear in Spanish and Catalan Translations

Jehan Zitawi (2004)
The Translation of Disney Comics in the Arab World: A Pragmatic Perspective

Sung-Hee Kirk (2005)
Cohesion Shifts in English-Korean Translation

Carmen Dayrell (2005)
Investigating Lexical Patterning in a Comparable Corpus of Brazlian Portuguese

Dimitrios Asimakoulas (2005)
Brecht in Dark Times: Translations of Brecht's Works in the Censorship Context of the Greek Junta (1967-1974)

Wenjing Zhao(2005)
Hu Shi's Rewritings and the Construction of a New Culture

Wallace Chen (2006)
Explicitation through the Use of Connectives in Translated Chinese: A corpus-based Study

Sameh Fekry Hanna (2006)
Towards a Sociology of Drama Translation: A Boudieusian Perspective on Translation of Shakespeare's Great Tragedies in Egypt

Michela Baldo (2009)
Translation and Renarration in Italian Canadian Writing: Codeswitching, Focalisation, Voice and Plot in Nino Ricci's Plot and Its Italian Translation