Invited Speakers
Abstracts are in Acrobat (pdf) format.
- Martha P. Y. Cheung
Rethinking Activism: The Power and Dynamics of Translation in China during the Late Qing Period (1840-1911)
(Abstract)
- Josie Guy and Rose Laynbalaynba
A tsunami after a disaster: Long-term implications of the Northern Territory Emergency Response
This keynote presentation is sponsored by the Northern Territory Aboriginal Interpreter Service.
(Abstract)
- Francis Jones
The personal is interpersonal is political: Modelling translation and conflict
(Abstract)
- Jeff McWhinney
The impact of video communication technologies on sign language users and interpreters
This keynote presentation is sponsored by the Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association (ASLIA).
(Abstract)
- Sehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar
A ‘Secularizing’ Translation: The Call to Prayer in Turkish
(Abstract)
Martha Cheung
Martha P.Y. Cheung is Chair Professor and Head of the Translation Programme (B.A. Hons.), Director of the Centre for Translation, and Course Director of the M.A. Programme in Translation and Bilingual Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has translated many works of Chinese Literature into English, including the work of Han Shaogong, Liu Sola, and Hong Kong poets such as Leung Ping Kwan. She co-edited (with Jane C.C. Lai) An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (1997) and co-translated (with Jane C.C. Lai) 100 Excerpts from Zen Buddhist Texts (1997).
Martha is Editor-in-Chief (Chinese translation) of the Oxford Children’s Encyclopedia (9 volumes, 2082 entries, 1998), and Editor-in-Chief (English translation) of An Illustrated Chinese Materia Medica in Hong Kong (506 entries, 2004). She also edited Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (1998) and An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume One: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project (2006). Her research interests include translation history, translation theory, translation criticism, and the teaching of translation. She is now working on volume two of An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation.
Josie Guy and Rose Laynbalaynba
Josie Guy is the current Training Coordinator for the Northern Territory Aboriginal Interpreter Service. She is a member of the Gurindji Nation, the heartland of Indigenous Land Rights. Josie's mother was taken from her country in 1922 to the Kahlin Institution in Darwin. Josie has had a long history of advocating for Indigenous Rights here in Australia and at United Nations forums in Geneva, Switzerland, in particular the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights. Josie has had an extensive working history at the executive level in both the Northern Territory and Commonwealth Public Service and NGO agencies. Her working background has been in Indigenous Employment, Training, Health, Land Rights, Legal Services, Arts, Governance and now with the Aboriginal Interpreter Service.
My name is Rose Laynbalaynba, and I am an indigenous Yolngu woman from the Milingimbi community. My clan group is Gupapuyngu. I have obtained NAATI accreditation in translating as a paraprofessional interpreter between English and Burarra and English and Djambarrpuyngu languages, however I speak several other dialects, such as Yanhangu, Kriol and Tjinang. I have completed across the board training with the Aboriginal Interpreter Service.
Since November 2000, I have been an interpreter with the Aboriginal Interpreter Service. To date I have completed 463 interpreting jobs. My field of expertise is mainly in the health, legal and court arenas. I continue to provide interpreting as the need arises. One day, I would hope that my people understand my job as an interpreter, and I would like to be able to teach Yolngu people themselves what I am doing. Hopefully I will be successful in teaching more of traditional law. That is what I want to achieve.
Francis Jones
Francis Jones studied Serbo-Croat and German at Cambridge University, followed by a postgraduate year (1977-1978) studying modern Serbo-Croat poetry at Sarajevo University. He has an MA in Applied Linguistics from Reading University (1988) and a PhD in foreign-language self-instruction from Newcastle University (1996).
Francis Jones is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, where he teaches and researches translation studies. Among his recent concerns are: how poetry translation mediates images of the former/post-Yugoslav region during and after the wars of the 1990s; the role of working teams, networks and conflicting interest groups in this process; and the personal choices faced by literary translators from a region riven by civil and ideological strife.
Since the late 1970s he has also worked as a freelance translator and translation editor, mainly from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch (but also French, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Dutch-based creoles) into standard and regional Englishes. In recent years his translating and editing work have focused on poetry and Islamic philosophy respectively. His poetry translations have won nine prizes to date in the UK, Bosnia, Netherlands and USA.
Jeff McWhinney
Jeff McWhinney is the Managing Director of Significan’t, and was formerly the CEO of the British Deaf Association, which he led for almost a decade, realising that organisation’s 30-year campaign to have BSL officially recognised as a language used in the UK. He is former Governor of Frank Barnes Primary School, which uses Sign Bilingualism – there are a few schools in the UK which use this method. He is Chair of the European Union of the Deaf’s Information and Communication Technology Experts Working Group, which works to disseminate information on the latest advances in technology and share the experiences and benefits gained for the sign language communities throughout the EU.
Jeff is currently the MD of Significan’t, a social enterprise dedicated to exploiting the latest technology advances for the purposes of improving life quality and access for the BSL communities. Its latest development is the SignVideo Contact Centre, the UK’s first BSL video interpreting service that operates over many different video platforms (ISDN, IP, 3g and SIP). It was recognised and was selected as an exemplary example of public services delivery at the 2007 Public Services Reform Conference. Jeff was the runner up at The Guardian Public Servant of the Year Awards (2006) in recognition of his work in bringing BSL access to the public sector.
Finally, a Deaf father of four deaf children, he comes from a Deaf family and uses sign language as a first language.
Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar
