Dr Christine Meng JI Associate Professor, MA (University College London), PhD (Imperial College London)
Christine specialises in empirical translation studies, especially data-driven multilingual corpus analyses. She has published on environmental translation, healthcare translation, statistical translation stylistics/authorship attribution, and international multilingual education. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices, New York: Oxford University Press (with Sara Laviosa) (2020); editor of Advances in Empirical Translation Studies, Cambridge University Press (with Michael Oakes) (2019); guest special section editor of Leonardo: TransCreation: Creativity and Innovation in Translation, Cambridge: The MIT Press (2020); a founding editorial board member of the series of Cambridge Elements of Translation and Interpreting, Cambridge University Press (https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/translation-and-interpreting); and the founding editor of Routledge Studies of Empirical Translation and Multilingual Communication, New York/Oxon: Routledge (https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Empirical-Translation-and-Multilingual-Communication/book-series/RSET). Her research has been supported by the British Academy, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences, the Australian Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, Toshiba International Foundation, Worldwide University Networks Research Development Fund, and a number of leading universities in Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, Brazil. She is a qualified professional translator between English, Spanish and Chinese having previously worked for international organisations before teaching at universities.
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Ms Shannon Lin, BSc (Sydney School of Public Health), MA (University of Wollongong), PhD candidate APD/CDE. PhD supported by the Commonwealth Government Research Training Scholarship
The current pressing needs from the public health perspective is to reduce the diabetes epidemic worldwide especially within the high risk Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) populations. In Australia, the Chinese migrants count the largest non-English speaking migrant population but with one of the highest prevalence in diabetes, which have intensified the pressure within the Australian healthcare system. One of the well-recognised strategies is to improve the diabetes health literacy for people with diabetes, so they are capable of self-managing their own diabetes to achieve better clinical outcomes. For Chinese migrants with diabetes and poor English literacy, the recommendation is to use accessibility and effectiveness of the translated patient-education materials (PEMs). My research aims to to develop a patient-centred healthcare translation evaluation system to assess the readability, understandability and actionability of PEMs in order to ensure the translation quality in the target language with an appropriate health literacy demand to the target audience. The system constitutes with three assessments, namely readability calculators, Patient Education Material Assessment Tool (PEMAT) and Patient-orientated Culturally-Adapted (POCA) model, which focus on the different elements of reading comprehension of the healthcare translation in Chinese. A mixed qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. This cross-disciplinary research that synergizes the advanced research methodologies from public health and translation study to create a health literacy friendly environment to improve the health literacy amongst migrants. Therefore, it may help with the diabetes self-management as well as the associated clinical outcomes. This system can help to achieve a patient-centred healthcare translation, while offering some solutions to the lessen the pressure in the Australian healthcare system and providing answers to the current diabetes epidemic in the CALD populations.
Keywords: Health literacy, healthcare translation, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) populations, Chinese migrants, Patient Education Materials (PEM), diabetes self-management, bilingual health professional led translation.
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Hankiz Dolan, MSc (Medical School, Fudan University, Shanghai), PhD candidate
Culturally and linguistically adapting a contraceptive method-choice decision aid for Chinese migrant women living in Australia
Hankiz a PhD candidate enrolled at the School of Public Health, the University of Sydney. Hankiz’s PhD project is about adapting shared decision-making strategies and tools in contraceptive counselling for Chinese migrant women living in Australia. With the advances in modern technology and science, medical decision-making has become increasingly complex. When people are faced with making treatment, preventative or lifestyle decisions, they often have more than one options, which could result in similar outcomes, to choose from. In these situations, the best choice often depends on what matters most to the individual person because each of those options has it’s of trade-offs. Choosing a contraceptive method is one such typical preference-sensitive decision. Currently, in Australia, there are a wide variety of contraceptive methods that are available for people to choose from. Each of those contraceptive methods has it’s associated efficacy in preventing pregnancies, mechanism of action, the duration for use, potential side-effects and sometimes, non-contraceptive therapeutic benefits. Many women in their reproductive age in Australia use one form or another of contraceptive methods. However, not every woman has access to evidence-based information on key attributes of all available contraceptive methods. Women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are especially disadvantaged in terms of accessing and utilising culturally and linguistically sensitive information on contraceptive methods. Globally, the moment for patient-centred care, informed and shared decision-making had called for ensuring patient/person’s right to unbiased and evidence-based information about medical options. This moment saw a growing interest in developing patient decision aids. There are a number of contraceptive method-choice decision aids that are developed internationally. However, there is none in the language of Chinese. Chinese migrants are one of the largest overseas-born groups in Australia. The need for extending the latest initiatives and strategies in informed and shared decision-making among Chinese migrants is imminent. During the course of her PhD project, Hankiz had adapted and translated a contraceptive method-choice decision aid for Chinese migrant women in Australia. She also investigated the information, communication and support needs of Chinese migrant women in choosing contraceptive methods in Australia. Based on her findings, Hankiz’s next stage of research will involve enhancing the translation of the decision aid, developing a model for evaluating the quality of the translation of patient decision aids, and create a culturally and linguistically adapted decision aid on contraceptive methods and broader sexual and reproductive health issues for Chinese women living in Australia and beyond. She will also work on extending the adaptation and translation of patient decision aids to other diverse culturally and linguistically diverse groups.
Keywords: medical decision-making, patient-centred care, risk communication, health translation, contraceptive method-choice, Chinese migrant women, culturally and linguistically diverse population groups.
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Miss Mengdan Zhao, MA (East China Normal University), PhD candidate. PhD funded by the Sydney China Studies Centre Way In Postgraduate Research Scholarship.
Salt-intake health risks communication in digital news: translating knowledge into public health discourse in Australia and China.
Excessive dietary salt intake has become one of the major dietary health risk factors in the current world, the severity of which is associated with various non-communicable diseases and health damage. However, dietary habits may be modified more effectively based on public health promotion research. My research focuses on mainstream media intervention of dietary salt intake in Australia and China. In both countries, digital news act as the main source of health information for the public. Mass media can reach a large audience via digital communication. My project conducts a comparative study of digital health media as an effective population-level dietary intervention tool. Specifically, my project using multimodal corpus data and analytical tools to investigate the mainstream media coverage of salt intake excess in Australia and China, which are considered large contributing factors to lifestyle relate chronic diseases in both countries. Through a corpus-driven, multimodal digital media analysis (in Australian English and mainland Chinese), my project will identify the similarities and differences between Australian and Chinese mainstream digital news, and evaluate the contents in terms of of their cultural accessibility and informational readability. My research will provide an empirical model of public health knowledge dissemination, especially the translation and communication of specialised health knowledge into accessible, informative public health media to increase the health literacy of the general public.
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Ms Ziqing Lyu, MA (Shanghai International Studies University) PhD Candidate. PhD Project funded by the Sydney China Studies Centre Way In Postgraduate Research Scholarship.
Revisiting translational norms: A corpus-based study on the source-oriented strategies in the translation of The Three Body Problem 三体
The year of 2014 has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of Chinese science fiction (hereafter referred as SF). The Three Body Problem (hereafter referred as TTBP)（Santi,《三体》）, the first volume in a hugely successful SF trilogy composed by Chinese author Liu Cixin, was translated and published that year for English speakers to read and enjoy. Considered as the most beloved SF in China, TTBP also enjoys great popularity among English readers with the reputation of Hugo Winner for 2015; in a world where English functions as the lingua franca, it is the first translated work to be bestowed the honor. According to the data from Amazon (one of the world’s biggest on-line book sellers, data retrieved on 14 April, 2019), the sales of TTBP ranked the first among translated Chinese books. With respect to the success of TTBP in the international market, another name on its cover can never be overstated, and that is the translator Ken Liu. Ken Liu’s prime role has been perceived to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap among diversities. In the Translator’s Postscript of TTBP, he highlights his pursuit of “preserving original nuances of meaning” in the target text and implies his source-text oriented translation strategy, which might have been risky in the target-centered Anglophone publishing hegemony (Venuti, 2008:1) and clashed with the prevalent target-oriented translational norms. My study aims to reveal the source-oriented translation patterns of a translator whose intention has been resistant to the current translation convention and notion, and evaluate his practice in the light of large-scale readers’ reviews. I plan to embrace the parallel corpus-based analysis of Santi and its translation TTBP as well as the comparable corpus-based analysis between the corpus of TTBP and COCA, during which the specific translation techniques and methods correlated with linguistic variables from lexical, collocational, rhetorical and contextual level can be revealed; furthermore, a corpus-based examination of 9144 pieces of readers’ online reviews captured from Goodreads would be conducted to reflect the reception effect in accordance with translator’s practice. It is hoped that this original study may have implications for the correlation between a translator’s motivation and practice as well as a new model for understanding the role a translation plays in the target culture, and shed light on the circulation and reception of contemporary Chinese literature.
Keywords: corpus-based translation studies, source-oriented strategies, science fiction, TTBP, target readers’ reception
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Miss Yanmeng Liu, MA (Xi’an Jiaotong University) PhD Candidate. PhD project funded by the University of Sydney AR Davis Postgraduate Research Memorial Scholarship.
From Evidence to Practice: Developing Corpus-based Statistical Evaluation Model of Translation Quality
Even though translation studies have enjoyed rapid development, the critical research question concerning translation quality assessment (TQA) represents an important but underexplored area of research in the field. Plus, the vast demand and prosperous development of translation make the issue of TQA in an even more urgent need to be settled. The aim of my PhD research is to explore a more objective and feasible approach for translation quality evaluation. With the advancement of computer technology, the novel paradigm of corpus translation studies (CTS) has great potential to narrow the gap by removing a great due of subjectivity and improving the feasibility of evaluation operation. In this project, TQA can benefit from the proposed corpus-based approach in several ways: corpora can be used to profile translation quality is a more objective manner, as they analyse translation as a product itself instead of personal understandings of it. Besides, corpus-based assessment criteria are systematic and can compare translations on lexical, syntactical and grammatical levels. Lastly, the complex issue of TQA is transferred into the comparison of linguistic features extracted from corpora, which is more straightforward for both evaluators and translators to interpret.
Key words: Translation quality assessment (TQA), data-driven analysis, objective assessment, machine learning, corpus statistics.
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Miss Elena Zhang, BA, MA University of International Business and Economics (supported by The Directorate General for Interpretation of the European Union), PhD candidate.
Developing Empirical Evaluation Instruments for Speech-Enabled Bilingual Online Medical Education (SEBOME)
Machine translation (MT) has been evolving rapidly in recent years. An important research area within MT is MT quality evaluation, i.e. the evaluation of the quality of the output by MT system. Automated MT evaluation approach is highly efficient and reliable, but it has limited ability to identify and classify translation problems and errors related to the fluency, idiomaticity and readability of the MT outputs. In highly specialised domains, such as medical and healthcare translation, there are more urgent needs to develop integrated evaluation frameworks and instruments to facilitate the development, testing and implementation of high-quality healthcare MT systems. This is because, compared with other translation genres, such as business, finance, law, science, medical and healthcare translation puts greater emphasis on the usability and acceptability of the translation outputs, given the primary function of medical and healthcare translation to facilitate the effective, accurate and culturally-appropriate communication between the parties engaged in a medical/health setting. The development of medical interpreting systems requires advanced language engineering systems capable of analyzing and processing speech data and audio signals. Many existing medical interpreting systems and mobile applications rely on large-scale bilingual databases of readily translated resources. These systems have limitations in terms of the format (mostly fixed phrases) and the scope (phrase varieties) of the input data. Compared with the evaluation of MT outputs, computerized medical interpreting has been primarily relied on the feedback from the intended user groups such as physicians and patients. There have been however limited efforts made at incorporating and adapting well tested empirical evaluation methods from MT to speech-enabled bilingual online medical education (SEBOME). SEBOME has important applications in multicultural societies. The advantages of SEBOME consist in its flexibility and versatility of delivering medical and health information and engaging with multilingual and multicultural populations. Different from text-based medical and health education, speech-enabled bilingual medical communication can significantly lower the barriers to abstract medical information of people with limited English proficiency levels: popular speech-enabled medical education resources are bilingual or translated podcasts, audiovisual materials available on the websites of health promotion organizations and creditable social media platforms.
Keywords: Machine translation quality, speech translation technology, bilingual medical communication, medical interpreting, health equity
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Miss Amisa Riliu Huang, BA (University of Sydney), MA (Research) with Distinction
A Skopos theory-based Study of Translation Strategies of Traditional Chinese Medicine Terms and Decoctions: Shāng Hán Lùn
Over thousands of years of medical practice, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has grown into a unique medical theoretical system. By the late Qing Dynasty, western medicine became another major medical system in China which coexisted with TCM. Nowadays, an increasing number of international TCM physicians and sinologists are working on a deeper understanding of TCM. Due to lack of systematic theoretical guidance, translators have adopted diverse translation strategies when working on the translation of TCM-specific concepts and terminology, resulting in inconsistency or even contradiction in the translation outputs. The translation of TCM requires a clear, concise description and synthesis of their medical usage while taking into account the important cultural messages contained therein. Skopos theory allows the function-oriented analysis of the relationship between the target (English) cultural environment, the communicative purpose of translation, and the target readers’ acceptability levels, the source (Chinese) language and the traditional Chinese culture and medical knowledge system. Within the framework of Skopos theory, my research – based on the corpus analysis of a few popular English versions of the Chinese medical classic Shāng Hán Lùn (傷寒雜病論 circa 300 AD) – attempts to offer suggestions about culturally effective, practical methods and principles for the translation of TCM symptom names, disease names, and decoction names from classical Chinese to English. My research shows that medical translation of historical materials can offer valuable insights into the important cultural dimension of scientific knowledge development in different social systems.
Keywords: Skopos theory; TCM; Translation Strategies; Shāng Hán Lùn
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Mr Zihan He, Bachelor of Commerce (the University of Queensland), Master of Arts in Chinese Translation and Interpreting (the University of Queensland), PhD Candidate.
Developing Translation Strategies for Dementia-Related Educational Material to Improve the Accessibility of Chinese Australians
Dementia is the 2nd leading cause of death in Australia. Dementia can occur at any time for anybody, but people aged over 65 are found to be a vulnerable group for dementia compared to younger people. For Chinese Australians, most of them were born outside Australia and their overall English fluency is relatively limited, which consequently leads to an extra barrier for them to access English dementia-related information designed for Australians. Currently, much dementia-related educational material in Chinese available online is not culturally appropriate and sometimes not even linguistically understandable. Moreover, the traditional Chinese name for dementia – “痴呆症” (Stupidity and Idiocy Disease) is also full of stigma, resulting in Chinese people’s reluctance to face dementia – seeking relevant information and medical attention. Zihan’s research is to develop translation strategies for dementia-related educational material to produce culturally appropriate and linguistically understandable (CALU) translation, which may reduce the mental burden when Chinese Australians read the translation. Zihan has put his CALU translation into practice for the website of “Face Dementia” (https://facedementia.au/zh/). His research outcome is estimated to contribute to translating dementia-related educational material in language pairs, including English-Chinese, English-Vietnamese, and English-Arabic.
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Ms Heiyeon Christine Myung, PhD candidate.
The importance of formal equivalence in healthcare interpreting – developing interpreting guidelines
Medical encounters involve phases ranging from the initial reason for the visit to diagnosis and treatment, and communication plays a critical role between healthcare professionals and patients during consultations. In multicultural settings like Australia, language barriers often result in miscommunication, which can be unsafe for patients with low English proficiency (LEP). Healthcare interpreting, therefore, becomes essential to ensure effective and accurate communication. However, interpreting as accurately transferring meaning may not fully serve its role to some patients who exhibit communication disorders with speech sound disorders or socially inappropriate communication. Interpreting in such contexts goes beyond simple language translation. My research project aims to identify common symptoms and diagnosis processes of patients with speech difficulties, especially those derived from brain injuries, and create guidelines to train interpreters working in healthcare settings. The study will investigate the importance of formal equivalence in aiding healthcare professionals and interpreters in the early detection of brain injury-related conditions and establish a definition of interpreting within healthcare to provide an overview of the required skills. By doing so, the project seeks to improve communication quality in healthcare, ensuring better patient outcomes through effective interpreting practices.
Keywords: Healthcare interpreting, Formal Equivalence, Interpreter Training, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse populations (CALD) in Australia.
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Miss Hongchong Yu, B.Ed. (Hons I), B.A. (Chinese & Japanese Studies), PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies.
Developing Integrated Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Intervention Strategies to Optimise the Readership Accessibility of Chinese Translations of English Health Information on Cardiovascular Diseases
Hongchong is presently immersed in her doctoral research in collaboration with Sydney School of Public Health, focusing primarily on advancing methodologies for the production of multicultural-inclusive health translations in pursuit of inclusivity and equity in multicultural health communication in Australia. The overarching aim of her proposed PhD research project is to develop cross-linguistic intervention strategies specifically tailored to enhance the overall comprehensibility of Chinese translations of English health information on cardiovascular diseases directed towards the Chinese-speaking community in Australia, enabling the design of English health information materials of heightened cross-cultural accessibility and inclusiveness.
“Language is the alchemy of the soul, transforming mere words into vessels of meaning, empathy, and cross-cultural connection, wielding a power that transcends the boundaries of time and space. As a higher degree research student with an Eastern Asian ethnic background raised in Australia – A nation renowned for celebrating its multiculturalism and linguistic diversity, I am deeply intrigued by delving into the examination of worldwide social dynamics through a perspective that embraces the richness of cultural exchange and complexities of global interconnectedness.” – Miss Hongchong Yu