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 Introduces:
An Interview With Guillaume Deneufbourg : “Jack of all trades” in the field of translation
Roula Salam ~ Host & Moderator
Roula is the current President of ATIA, a council member of FIT, and is on the CAN CGSB Working Committee for translation and interpretation standards. Roula teaches English language and literature at the English Language School at the University of Alberta and is an Arabic-English certified translator. She holds a PhD degree in English Literature from Queen’s University, Ontario.
Speaker: Guillaume Deneufbourg
Guillaume Deneufbourg (43, Belgium) could be hailed as the quintessential “jack of all trades” in the field of translation. Former translation project manager and technical translator (dentistry and military strategy, among others), he is now simultaneously a university translation teacher, an award-winning literary translator, a translation agency manager, an individual contractor for the UN and an engaged member of the voluntary sector (as a former president of the Belgian association CBTI and as a current FIT council member)! How does he manage to wear all these hats and why would he shoulder so many responsibilities?
During this presentation, Guillaume will delve – using his own example – into the multifaceted nature of tasks and income streams within the translation industry. He will illustrate how a career can be constructed upon several mutually reinforcing pillars, highlighting how diversification can offer job security, enhance credibility, and guarantee intellectual stimulation. He will show how diversification can be particularly relevant at a time when our certainties are being upended by technological advancements.
Guillaume will also expound upon his strategies for juggling these diverse responsibilities, sharing some of his key “secrets”, e.g. about time management, mitigating distractions, and using deep focus strategies. This will be a talk that perfectly aligns with this year FIT’s ITD theme: “Translation Unveils the Many Faces of Humanity.”
Check his profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumedeneufbourg/
University of Alberta Modern Languages and Cultural Studies – Student Panel:
Panel Moderator: Odile Cisneros
Odile Cisneros received her PhD from New York University. She is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.
Panelist: Monika Pitonak, MA Candidate
Presentation: “Translator Training in Canada: History and New Directions.”
On the basis of the author’s thesis research, the presentation will explore translation training offered by translation associations across Canada. It will include a discussion of the background/context of the study, including existing scholarship about translator training and education programs, both generally worldwide and specifically in Canada. The research questions and aims of the study will also be addressed as well as the current progress of the study.
Monika Pitonak is currently an M.A. student with the department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Monika grew up in a bilingual household, with a mom speaking Czech and a dad speaking Slovak. Monika is proficient in English, Czech, Slovak, French, and Spanish and has also taken courses in Russian and Cree. Monika’s research interests are primarily focused on translation, especially official document translation is also interested in intercultural communication and translation, and the ways that language, translation, and identity interact.
Panelist: Hongyang Ji, PhD Candidate
Presentation: “Where Do We Go? The Post-Anthropocentric Consideration in Translation Studies.”
This presentation aims to discuss post-anthropocentric translation activities by expanding the conventional concept of translation in the field of translation studies. Translation can be regarded as an ongoing process of building connections. In the first part of the presentation, I will discuss the rationale of considering that translation does not exclusively revolve around humanity from several perspectives: the critique of human exceptionalism, the limitation of Jakobson’s categories of translation, post-anthropocentric/post-humanist thinking to expand the narrow concept of translation. In the second part, I will seek the possibility of considering translation as a method to build interrelations on our planet based on the implications of complexity thinking. These interactions indicate the collaboration of translation studies and other scientific disciplines to seek new methodologies to describe translation activities and their impacts as well as the interaction between humans and non-humans.
Hongyang Ji is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, specializing in translation studies. He holds a master’s degree in Translation Studies from Glendon College, York University, Canada. He has been a translation freelancer with various private companies for over four years. His current research focuses on the ecological approaches to translation. His research interests include translation theory, sociological translation studies, philosophy and translation, and biology and translation.
Panelist: Houssem Ben Lazreg, PhD Candidate
Presentation: “General Haftar vs. Government of National Accord in Libya: The Representation(s) of Conflict in Global News.”
For several decades, the Middle East and North African region (MENA) has been known as a sensitive region characterized by hostility between neighboring countries and transnational belligerent armed factions. Translation plays a key role in how these conflicts and belligerents are represented and portrayed by international news outlets. This talk seeks precisely to investigate the linguistic and political representations of the 2018 military campaign by General Khalifa Haftar on the Libyan capital Tripoli by examining how media, politics, and translation form a complex nexus that not only shapes socio-political realities, but also influences how news is received by a particular audience. By representations, I refer to the ideological, symbolic, and cultural components expressed in language, which serve as a way of portraying conflict meaningfully. More specifically, I examine how the warring factions (General Haftar and his army vs the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli) have been portrayed/represented in the global news by investigating the tools and strategies used in the production of translated news discourse. I also seek to shed light on the role of ideology and media patronage on the outcome of the translation process. All this will be analysed in tandem with the geopolitical context in the MENA region including the interference of foreign and regional powers in the conflict.
Houssem Ben Lazreg is a freelance translator/interpreter, Ph.D. candidate and a teaching assistant for French/Arabic at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. His research interests include international politics, translation and journalism. His literary translations have appeared in journals such as Transcultural, Transference, Multilingual Discourses, and Metamorphosis, while his commentaries on international affairs are published with Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, International Relations, Aljazeera, ABC, and The Conversation.
Panelist: Mehdi Asadzadeh, PhD, Assistant Professor at the IAU (Islamic Azad University) and Visiting Scholar
Presentation: “Education in Mother Tongue as A Humanitarian Right for Migrant Students: The Case of Canada”
During the last decades, the migrant population has dramatically increased in Canada with people coming from all over the world. In 2021, the majority of immigrants were born in Asia (including the Middle East) and an increasing share was coming from Africa. The rapid increase in the foreign population with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, most of whom with children who have never had previous contact with the language and culture of the host country, poses many challenges out of which communicational and educational problems are at the core. Through this presentation, I will try to show how the growing number of immigrants worldwide has necessitated the need for having sufficient and proper educational materials for the immigrants’ mother languages in host countries with the aim of shedding light on the entitlement of the migrant children to the right to be educated in their own languages. In such a process, due legislation must not to be overlooked in designing platforms and frameworks for textbook development once all required conditions, like the numbers and financial resources, are met.
Mehdi Asadzadeh is an Assistant Professor at the IAU (Islamic Azad University), Iran. He has supervised many Master’s and PhD Students and has been involved in various research projects. He is a Certified & Sworn Translator with years of experience. He has translated three books dealing with Human Rights (Human Rights, Terrorism and Counter-terrorism & Intellectual Asset Management for Universities & Human Rights and Technology”: Mapping the Landscape to Support Grantmaking). Dr. Asadzadeh is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Alberta. |
