Back to School ?

by Katerina Strani

The new Academic Year has started and LINCS is full of students again. It’s good to see enthusiastic freshers, new MSc and PhD students as well as old familiar faces.

But even though undergraduate students get a break from uni during the summer, staff and postgraduate students are busier than ever. So what did we do over the summer?

  • Held the annual Edinburgh Interpreting Research Summer School (30 June – 4 July): Intensive research training for existing and future scholars in any field of interpreting. 5 days of seminars on research design and methods, lectures on current trends in conference, public service and sign-language interpreting, workshops on writing a literature review to maximising research impact, presentations by participants. Oh, and guest lectures by Barbara Moser-Mercer and Franz Pöchhacker.
  • Held the annual Applied English and Interpreting Summer Course (4-22 August): Intensive interpreting training (CPD) for professional interpreters. One week of British Culture and Society, British and Scots Law and public speaking, two weeks of intensive consecutive and simultaneous interpreting into English, including multilingual mini-conferences.
  • Ran Academic English Programmes to enable students to reach the required entry levels for English language and to prepare to study in a UK context. 450 students attended 12, 6 and 3-week courses with an overall pass rate of 98% ! These courses use Access EAP: Frameworks, co-authored by Olwyn Alexander, Academic Director of the English section and nominated for an ELTon award in 2014. The pre-sessional courses are accredited by BALEAP and were inspected for re-accreditation in August. Innovations this year include a strand of subject-specific seminars to enable Business Management students to prepare to engage with postgraduate study. There were also a series of Open Days within Academic Schools to welcome new students to the university.

We’ve also been busy with Public Engagement activities, such as:

  • BSL summer school for school kids, voted as the No.1 school experience day for kids this year! For more information, contact Gary Quinn.

Finally, we secured funding for three collaborative research projects:

1. Dr Raquel de Pedro Ricoy secured AHRC Research Innovation Grant funding under the Translating Cultures theme. The project, entitled “Translating cultures and the legislated mediation of indigenous rights in Peru”, to be conducted over 20 months (October 2014 – June 2016), has been awarded over £200,000. The aim of this project is to examine translation and interpreting processes between Spanish and indigenous languages in contexts of consultation between agents of the state, outside bodies and members of the indigenous communities against the background of escalating industrial exploitation of the natural resources lying below indigenous lands. The research team includes Professor Rosaleen Howard (Chair of Hispanic Studies, Newcastle University) and Dr Luis Andrade (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima), and will work with Peru’s Ministry of Culture and the NGO Servicios Educativos Rurales as Project Partners.

2. Professor Jemina Napier also secured AHRC Research Innovation Grant funding under the Translating Cultures theme for a project entitled “Translating the Deaf Self”. The project will be conducted over 18 months (January 2015- June 2016) and has been awarded over £198,000. Its aims are to investigate translation as constitutive of culture and as pertinent to the well being of Deaf people who sign and rely on mediated communication to be understood and participate in the majority. The deaf-hearing sign bilingual research team, co-led by Professor Napier and Professor Alys Young (Professor of Social Work Education & Research at the University of Manchester) will include deaf researcher Rosemary Oram and another deaf research assistant, and will work with Action Deafness in Leicester as Project Partner.

3. Dr Katerina Strani secured funding by the European Commission Directorate General for Justice for a project entitled “RADAR: Regulating Anti-Discrimination and Anti-Racism”. The project involves 9 partners, it will be conducted over 24 months (November 2014 – October 2016) and Heriot-Watt has been awarded over £33,000. The  aim is to provide law enforcement officials and legal professionals with the necessary tools to facilitate the identification of “racially motivated” hate communication. For this purpose, a communication-based training model will be developed for professionals at the national level and for trainers at the international level, as well as online learning resources. Finally, the project aims at producing a multilingual publication with concrete tools, recommendations and best practice examples to facilitate anti-discrimination and anti-racist actions and regulations.

So after a busy summer, it looks like we have an even busier year ahead.

Bring it on!