European Languages and Cultures

Literary Translation

Our researchers are engaged in translation studies in both a creative and theoretical capacity. Our translators have published translations of various types of literary and creative works, including classic novels, explorers’ journals and contemporary works written for children, as well as important works on translation theory. Our translators work across a range of languages and translate both into and out of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Some of the authors whom our staff have translated include Colette, Elizabeth Jolley, Théodore Leschenault, Anthony Pym, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Emile Zola.

The act of translation is a form of creative writing as well as one of critical appraisal. UWA translators consider good literary translation an essential form of communication between cultures. And since place informs every sort of translation, we bring an Australian perspective to our work. Even as new advances in machine translation and artificial intelligence unfold, the human choices that inform literary translation remain of crucial importance. 

Our staff have close links with other international academic and non-academic translators and work together with organisations such as the Australian Association for Literary Translation and The AALITRA Review. We teach and supervise student translators who have the opportunity to produce a creative translation and commentary as part of a dissertation for the Master of Translation Studies or for the PhD.

People

• Kate Averis
• Anna Gadd
• Paul Gibbard
• Hélène Jaccomard
• John Kinder
• Alexandra Ludewig

Related Centres and Groups

• Translation and Transcultural Research Cluster
• UWA Language Hub

Language History, Philology, Linguistics

Our researchers engage with a wide variety of topics involving language history, philology, and broad questions in linguistics. How do languages change over time? Where do standard languages come from? And what languages did people speak in the past? Historical multilingualism and the study of old texts can help us to answer some of these very important questions. The way people spoke in the past, the development of scripts and the production of different types of texts, reveal the fascinating multilingual history of Europe and shed light on the present.

Staff have particular expertise in the medieval and early modern periods. They work with historical documents such as dictionaries, manuscripts and other material that is buried in archives around the world, to look at issues such as dialect contact, the development of pidgins and koines, as well as other contact phenomena between languages, such as loanwords. Many of our staff look at writers who have traditionally been ignored or assigned a marginalised role in the historical record, such as merchant letters, women writers, or religious texts.

New technologies from digital humanities are making this work easier, and are helping to recover forms of language that have been lost. Our researchers are at the forefront in adopting these technologies in their teaching and their research. Questions of language history and historical multilingualism are particularly important for countries like Australia, where English is a de facto language and the multilingual reality of its past remains hidden.

Creative Multilingualism: Literatures in European Languages

Research in European Languages and Cultures looks at literatures and literary theory across a range of European languages other than English, adopting a global outlook to examine works in a variety of genres produced both within and beyond Europe. Focusing on texts from the early modern period up to the present, projects take an interdisciplinary approach to analyse historical and contemporary works, with particular expertise in postcolonial theory, gender studies, French enlightenment thought, reception theory, German literature from the 1800s onwards, questions of identity in European thought, as well as Caribbean literature, French exploration in Australia, and translingual and transcultural approaches to writing.

People

• Bonnie Thomas
• Dale Adams
• Paul Gibbard
• Alexandra Ludewig
• Kate Averis
• Kati Tonkin

Teaching Innovation and Languages Education

There is a long tradition of teaching excellence in modern European Languages, Translation Studies, and across the School of Humanities in general. Our staff are at the forefront of teaching innovations, and revise their curricula on a regular basis to ensure best practice in languages education. Many of our staff have achieved professional recognition for their teaching achievements, and are members of the UK’s Higher Education Academy. Our staff are regularly nominated for teaching awards at the School and the University level.

Recent innovations in machine translation, integration of online video content, and benchmarking against the Common European Framework for the Reference on Languages provides a strong research culture in our discipline. Recent projects have looked at patterns of student attendance and drivers of engagement in languages education, the position of language disciplines in an international context, and the role of linguistics in languages education.

We have excellent links with the national association for languages education, the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities. Our staff regularly are constantly engaged in teaching innovation and present their research at their respective disciplinary associations, such as the Australian Society for French Studies, Australasian Centre for Italian Studies, German Studies Association of Australia and the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia.

People

• Bonnie Thomas
• Josh Brown
• Anna Gadd
• Kate Averis
• Marinella Caruso

Translation and Transcultural Research

Understanding the social and cultural issues of translation and multilingualism, migration, transcultural identity construction and communication.

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