Dr James Hadley, an early career researcher in translation and translingual studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), is on a mission to point out what we don’t know about the ways people produce, appreciate, and use translations.

I want to show how translation underpins everything we do in the 21st century, and why it is vital to all our lives. My central focus is translation theory, something that might sound quite straightforward. You just take a text in one language and rewrite it in another language without changing the message don’t you? What do you need a theory for?

Well, it is a lot more complicated than that. In translation studies, we look at the ways that translators’ personalities show through in the work they produce, the ways that their political, religious, or ideological leanings leave indelible marks on their translations, and the ways that aspects of the translator’s personality can go on to have massive, but usually unintentional and unforeseeable effects on people reading their work. More.

See: Talking Humanities

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