M.A. seminars 2023–2025 (Full-time programmes)

The list is sorted by the full-time M.A. programme to which the seminars apply. As you scroll the page down or click on the links in this paragraph, you will note headings with the names of the programmes:

• English Philology (Filologia angielska)
• Language and Communication in Healthcare
• Language, Mind, Technology
• Creative and Specialized Translation (Tłumaczenie kreatywne i specjalistyczne)
• Polish-English Conference Interpreting (Tłumaczenie konferencyjne polsko-angielskie).

Underneath each such heading you will find the seminars planned for the given programme, sorted by the name of its instructor, with a detailed description of each seminar.

Note

Candidates for the Written and Multimedia Translation (Tłumaczenie pisemne i multimedialne) programme, run by the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures in cooperation with the Faculty of English, we have a seminar for you, too—scroll down to the seminar by dr Olha Lehka-Paul, in the Polish-English Conference Interpreting section.

English Philology

For description of the programme, follow this link.

House of Dreams: New Currents in Contemporary American Literature

prof. UAM dr hab. Paulina Ambroży

Description

The aim of this seminar is to explore new currents in contemporary American literature in relation to the broad cultural, political, and social context of the 20th and 21st centuries. The topics of our consideration include issues of social, racial, gender, and cultural identity as well as the emergent and past ideological, existential, and political attitudes in the USA. Contemporary American novels engage in a creative and pluralistic dialogue with the canon, myths, and grand narratives of the American and global past, revising many conceptions of American culture, society and history. We shall look at the influence of new technologies, popular culture, and social media on everyday life, as well as the evolution of literary genres under the pressure of visual culture and digital media. Examples of such trends include digital literature, graphic novel, neogothic narratives, queer fiction and non-fiction, autobiographical writing, global fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic novel, ecological fiction.

Objectives

The seminar aims to expand students’ knowledge of American literature and culture, develop their research and critical thinking skills, and cultivate their openness to the diversity of cultural forms.

Credit requirements

Credit requirements include proficiency in English, systematic progress on the research project, enthusiastic and active participation in class discussions, occasional short reports, group presentations on the assigned topics, work-in-progress presentations based on M.A. projects.

History of the English language

prof. UAM dr hab. Ewa Ciszek-Kiliszewska

Description

Members of this seminar will be expected to specialise in and write their M.A. thesis on a selected topic related to the history of the English language. “History” in the name of the seminar is a very general concept and it is perfectly possible to write a thesis on very recent developments in English (say, over the last couple of decades or so). Within the team, they can choose from a variety of theoretical approaches and supervisors; in the 2023-2025 iteration they comprise:

• historical phonology, morphology, lexicon, language contact; historical sociolinguistics — Dr. Marcin Krygier
• Critical Metaphor Analysis, language of emotions, cognitive historical semantics, language contact — Dr. Anna Rogos-Hebda
• verbal and visual communication in early texts, social contexts of linguistic changes, sources of vocabulary in the history of English, English orthography: from manuscript to print — Dr. Justyna Rogos-Hebda
• historical sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics; standardisation, text and genre, visual pragmatics, historical orthography and typography — Dr. Hanna Rutkowska
• historical (socio)pragmatics, historical multilingualism, specialised discourses, (im)politeness, multimodality — Dr. Matylda Włodarczyk
• historical morphology, historical morphophonology, manuscript studies, historical literacy and codicology – Dr. Paulina Zagórska
• historical semantics, historical lexicon, historical word derivation – Dr. Ewa Ciszek-Kiliszewska

Upon admission to the seminar its members will work with their selected supervisors. They will be expected to complete at least the thesis plan, bibliography, and introduction by June 2024, two chapters by January 2025, and the thesis by May/June 2025.

Multimodal communication

prof. UAM dr hab. Małgorzata Fabiszak

Description

In this MA seminar we will be looking at how people communicate meanings recruiting a variety of semiotic resources: language, art, architecture and more. In doing so we will try to understand how people construct and perform their memory, identity and belonging through acts of meaning making. We will investigate these issues from the perspective of Visual multimodal communication theory (Forceville 2020), polisemiosis (Devylder and Zlatev 2020, Bloomberg and Zlatev 2021), and extended conceptual metaphor theory (Kovecses 2020). Apart from learning the conceptual frameworks mentioned above, we will also be collaborating with EYE-LANG – Eye-tracking Laboratory for Research in Language located at our Faculty in order to gather data about how people perceive visual communication. Students interested in any of these topics are invited to apply for the seminar.

Bibliography

• Blomberg, J. & J. Zlatev. 2021. Metalinguistic relativity. Does one’s ontology determine one’s view on linguistic relativity. Language and communication 76: 35-46.
• Devylder, S. & J. Zlatev. 2020. Cutting and breaking metaphors of the self and the motivation and sedimentation model. In A. Baicchi (ed.), Figurative meaning construction in thought and language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pp. 253-282.
• Forceville, Ch. 2020. Visual and Multimodal Communication. OUP.
• Kovecses, Z. 2020. Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. CUP.

Language Policy Studies

Michael Hornsby, Prof. UAM

Description

The period of four decades between 1980 and 2020 that straddled the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is widely regarded as one that witnessed a series of fundamental social, economic and political transformations. Many societies have become increasingly individualistic, mobile and diverse in terms of ethnicity and identity; their economies have become increasingly interconnected; and their governance structures have become increasingly complex, incorporating a growing number of different levels and actors. In addition, rapid advancements with regard to automated, digital and communication technology have had a far-reaching impact on how people interact with each other and participate in society. This seminar aims to advance a number of key questions in the field of revitalisation in minority languages and considers policies at the state, local and family levels of application. Students will work on a number of minoritised language case studies in order to contrast and compare how different governance is applied in different sites and contexts and will develop critical analytical skills in order to evaluate the effectiveness of such initiatives.

Bibliography

• Hornsby, Michael, and Wilson McLeod. Transmitting Minority Languages: Complementary Reversing Language Shift Strategies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022.
• Jones, Rhys., and Huw. Lewis. New Geographies of Language: Language, Culture and Politics in Wales. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2019. Web.
• McLeod, Wilson, and Huw Lewis. Language Revitalisation and Social Transformation. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
• McLeod, Wilson et al. Language, Policy and Territory: a Festschrift for Colin H. Williams. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Print.

Indigeneity and diaspora: Literary voices of contemporary Canada

prof. UAM Dr hab. Agnieszka Rzepa

Description

Contemporary Canada is a former settler colony, inhabited now by a richly diversified population that includes Indigenous peoples of the region (First Nations, Metis and Inuit) and various diasporas, i.e., groups of people who have arrived in Canada from other parts of the world. The seminar will focus on the diversity of literary voices in contemporary Canadian literature in English: voices that reflect particular ethnic traditions and histories they are rooted in, but also realities of life in Canada. Special focus will fall on prose texts, written in different forms, styles and genres, including emphasis on the different ways in which Indigenous and diasporic writers have been using autobiography, biography and other life-writing genres in their fiction writing, and the ways in which they have fictionalised auto/biographical texts. The seminar will also allow students to examine major changes in the critical discourse on Canadian literature. The course is reading-intensive.

Successful candidates wishing to participate in the seminar should have thorough knowledge of the US and/or British literature at the undergraduate (B.A.) level, and an avid interest in literature that goes beyond basic undergraduate requirements. At the selection stage, familiarity with Canadian literature is desirable, but not required.

Teaching English as a foreign language: the research-practice divide

prof. UAM dr hab. Paweł Scheffler

Description

A central goal of instructed second language acquisition research is to provide teachers with evidence-based pedagogical recommendations. For these recommendations to be implemented, however, two conditions must be met. First, L2 researchers need to disseminate their findings effectively and, second, L2 teachers need to be actively interested in putting these findings into practice.

In the first part of the seminar, we will first discuss proposals for instructional treatments offered by SLA researchers. Then we will examine studies investigating the impact of research publications and research conferences on teachers’ pedagogical practices. We will also look at how researchers themselves feel about the relevance of their findings to the foreign language classroom.

In the second part of the seminar, we will discuss various proposals that have been advanced to facilitate the flow of research to L2 teachers. Based on these proposals, we will consider the idea that in coursebook oriented EFL contexts like the one in Poland, it is primarily professional materials designers who should be responsible for translating research findings into pedagogical materials and practices. We will finish by examining in what way grammar instruction materials in popular EFL coursebooks used in Polish secondary schools relate to recommendations made in SLA research.

Selected literature

• Loewen, S. (2020). Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition, Second Edition. New York: Routledge.
• Marsden, E. J. & Kasprowicz, R. E., (2017). Foreign Language Educators’ Exposure to Research: Reported Experiences, Exposure Via Citations, and a Proposal for Action The Modern Language Journal. 101, 4, 613–642.
• Sato, M. & Loewen, S. (2019). Evidence-based second language pedagogy: A collection of instructed second language acquisition studies. New York: Routledge.
• Sato, M., Loewen, S. & Pastushenkov, D. (2021). ‘Who is my research for?’: Researcher perceptions of the research-practice relationship. Applied Linguistics, 1-26.

Exploring Victorian Literature and Culture: Insights into the Past and Present

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Setecka

Description

The Victorian period was the time of cultural and social transformations, and although Queen Victoria died over 120 years ago, thus symbolically marking the end of the period, Victorian literature and culture has continued to inspire writers and scholars well into the twenty-first century. While writers recreate the Victorian world imaginatively, scholars analyse Victorian writing to understand literary and cultural processes that are relevant for understanding both the Victorian past and the present.

In this seminar students will explore Victorian representations of topics which are still relevant today, including environmental concerns, the pervasive influence of capitalism, the fight for women’s rights, the question of gender identities, the allure of celebrity culture, and the role of scandal and sensation. By studying Victorian literature, it will be possible to gain valuable insights into these phenomena. This seminar will also explore Victorian literary genres and conventions, including both canonical novels and popular genres such as crime stories and sensation novels, which illuminate the darker aspects of Victorian society and depict the lives of social outcasts, thieves, and prostitutes.

The seminar is addressed to students who enjoy reading and discussing literature.

International Relations: The Crown, the Empire and the State in Literature in English in the Past and Today

prof. dr hab. Liliana Sikorska

Description

This seminar is devoted to the study of literature in English and various depictions of the ways in which writers responds to the complicated relations between nations and states. Beginning with the discussion of England’s ambivalent rapport with France and other European countries, we will then look into the Arab Middle East and the Far East (China and Japan) to account for the on-going oriental obsession in the works of medieval and contemporary writers. The relationship between Britain and Ireland will be discussed on the basis of the rewritings and appropriations of historical events as well as fictional renderings interesting incidents. Here, both the so called “high” as well as “low” (popular) literature will be included. Based on your individual interests, I will try to incorporate theoretical works which will help you write your MA thesis. The selection of texts for the seminars will cover mainly shorter works augmented by film adaptations and films related to the topics of the classes.

Suggested reading

• Boehmer, Elleke. 2009 [2005]. Stories of Women. Gender and Narrative in the postcolonial nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. (Ed.) 2000. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. London: Palgrave.
• Walder, Dennis. 1998. Post-Colonial Literatures in English. London: Blackwell.

Transmitting values and ideology in multimodal communication

Prof. UAM dr hab. Elżbieta Wąsik

Description

This seminar course is addressed to those students who are willing to write their MA theses on human communication from the viewpoint of its role in opinion formation, mediation, conflict resolution, etc. Therefore, it will focus on the concept of value, both individual and cultural, understood either as relative worth, or usefulness of an object, and/or as socially approved ideas about which people have positive or negative emotional responses, and which guide their decisions and behavior. In their theses, participants of the seminar will have the opportunity to analyze the linguistic manifestations of needs, attitudes, and values of human individuals who implement their plans and fulfill their goals and intentions at different levels of communication. Being engaged in their particular studies, conducted on single-handedly chosen journalistic or literary texts in English, they will take into account the fact that, in communication, messages can be transferred through different channels (vehicles), while, in social life, meanings can be realized through different media, such as, for example, film, theater, radio, television, newspaper, billboard, advertising, etc.

Bibliography

• Danesi, Marcel. 2002. Understanding media semiotics. London: Arnold.
• Lewis, Hunter. 1990. A question of values. Six ways we make the personal choices that shape our lives. New York: HarperCollins.
• Littlejohn, Stephen W. and Foss, Karen A. 2009. Encyclopedia of communication theory. New York: SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Rokeach, Milton. 1973. The nature of human values. New York: The Free Press.
• Wąsik, Elżbieta Magdalena. 2020. Linguistic dimensions of the self in human communication. Poznań: Wydawnictwa Naukowe UAM.

MA Seminar in comparative morpho-syntax

prof. dr hab. Jacek Witkoś

Description

Participants of this seminar will be able to prepare an MA thesis covering their preferred topic from the area of comparative syntax and morpho-syntax. The key area of interest concerns comparison of English and Polish linguistic structures and phenomena but studies of other languages (German, Russian, Spanish) are also possible. The comparative study will be carried out in a broadly conceived generative model, which, however need not dominate the work on the project. The MA candidate is free to define the major outline of the topic, while the instructor provides a helpful and useful instruction in relevant aspects of generative syntax. Preferably, the MA project should involve a substantial aspect of independent research undertaken by the candidate. For example, recently realized topics cover such areas as a comparative syntactic study of lexemes ‘love’ and ‘kiss’ used in English, German and Polish pop-songs from the 70-ies, or a comparison of passive constructions with psychological predicates in Russian, English and Polish.

As a prerequisite for the course, previous exposure to generative syntax is welcome but not critical. Keen interest in linguist matters will certainly facilitate a swift completion of the MA thesis.

Language and Communication in Healthcare

For description of the programme, follow this link.

Communication in healthcare contexts

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak

Description

The aim of this seminar is to broaden students’ interests and to extend their competences about language and communication in selected contexts of health/illness and human well-being. Students will develop an ability to read and write academic texts about communication in healthcare as well as to think critically and debate scholarly arguments. Selected contexts of communication in healthcare and issues of exclusion will be addressed, for example:

• doctor – patient communication
• language of psychotherapy, coaching, helping
• specialist medical language vs. lay language
• narratives of health and illness
• inclusive communication
• intergenerational communication about health
• healthcare communication across languages and cultures
• online communication about health
• health promotion
• popular media and health

Guided by the programme’s rich array of lectures and seminars, individual reading, personal experience and interest, each student will be invited to choose a specific healthcare context to study (see above). Having read about the relevant research theory and practice, they will then design an MA thesis project: (1) identify important social problems, (2) pose research questions, (3) select adequate research methodology, (4) collect data, (5) conduct an analysis to (6) arrive at results and conclusions addressing important issues of health(care) and quality of life.

Prerequisites

Good knowledge of English and passionate interest in human well-being.

Selected bibliography

• Brookes, Gavin and Daniel Hunt. 2021. Analysing health communication: Discourse approaches. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Gwyn, Richard. 2001. Communicating health and illness. London: Sage.
• Hamilton, Heidi and Wen-ying Sylvia Chou (eds.). 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication. London: Routledge.
• Fleischman, Susanne. 2001. “Language and medicine”, in: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 470-502.
• Harvey, Kevin and Neyla Koteyko. 2012. Exploring health communication. Language in action. London: Routledge.
• Markides, Markos. 2011. "The importance of good communication between patient and health professionals", Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology 33: 123-125.
• Thompson, Teresa L., Roxanne Parrott and Jon F. Nussbaum (eds.). 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication (2nd edition.) London: Routledge.
• Vermeir, P. 2015. "Communication in healthcare: A narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations", International Journal of Clinical Practice 69/11: 1257-1267.

(Mis)Communication about health and disease – discussing health-related topics in society

dr Magdalena Zabielska

Description

Communicating experience of health and disease seems a particularly sensitive issue which concerns our well-being, thus plays a vital role in various health-related contexts. This communication may take place in various configurations of participants and contexts: (1) doctor-and-patient (medical practice) e.g., medical interviews; (2) doctor-and-doctor (medical profession) e.g., specialist medical publications; (3) patient-patient (lay perspective) e.g., data from health-related online forums, online support groups, patients’ associations, etc. Yet, as various related discourse studies show, this communication is not always successful and thus socially sensitive discourse analysts tap into various contexts and data in order to offer some insights and recommendations to streamline it. Additionally, media products may be explored, such as popular scientific articles, social campaigns, medical TV dramas, etc. The study of these various data types allows one to shed light on how participants negotiate meaning, construct their identities as well as create or recreate discourses of different phenomena such as disease, patienthood, doctorability (Heritage and Robinson 2006), etc.

This seminar is meant to acquaint students not only with the knowledge of multiple facets of health communication but also equip them with the tools needed to examine its aspects. Their MA theses will be devoted to the study of various discourses in a variety of contexts within widely understood health communication.

Bibliography

• Brookes, Gavin and Daniel Hunt. 2021. Analysing health communication: Discourse approaches. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Fleischman, Susanne. 2001. “Language and medicine”, in: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 470-502.
• Gwyn, Richard. 2001. Communicating health and illness. London: Sage.
• Harvey, Kevin and Neyla Koteyko. 2012. Exploring health communication. Language in action. London: Routledge.
• Thompson, Teresa L., Roxanne Parrott and Jon F. Nussbaum (eds.) 2001. The Routledge handbook of health communication. New York: Routledge.

Language, Mind, Technology

For description of the programme, follow this link.

Corpus phonetics

prof. UAM dr hab. Kamil Kaźmierski

Description

Phonetic corpora are collections of audio recordings of speech accompanied by transcriptions. They contain recordings of unscripted speech, which contains speech patterns that may not surface in read speech. Data retrieved from speech corpora, together with appropriate statistical techniques such as mixed-effects regression modeling, can be used as a basis for quantitative analyses of linguistic variation. Specifically, research questions stemming from various theories referring to phonetic variation can be addressed. These include phonostylistics, sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, production-planning, phonological storage, and more.

In this seminar, you will learn why working with speech corpora might be useful, you will learn how speech corpora are built, you will learn to explore them and analyze the data that you retrieve from them. Armed with this know-how, you will use a phonetic corpus to explore a phenomenon of your choosing to write a quantitatively-oriented, empirically-based MA thesis.

Bibliography

• Durand, Jacques, Gut, Ulrike, & Kristoffersen, Gjert. 2014. Oxford handbook of corpus phonology. Oxford: OUP.

Current trends in the study on phonological representations

Prof. UAM dr hab. Paula Orzechowska

Description

Linguistic representations play a critical role in the field of linguistics and interdisciplinary studies. Also in phonology, researchers have been trying to find empirical evidence supporting the existence of linguistic units and principles in the minds of speakers. For instance, studies on articulatory coordination demonstrated that in some languages /s/ and the following plosive (as in spin, skin) do not constitute one onset. Psycholinguists have used response latencies to reveal the psychological reality of syllable sub-constituents (e.g. the rhyme), and neurolinguists have observed that different phonological features are represented in different locations in the brain.

The goal of this seminar is to discuss phonetic and phonological phenomena in English and other languages that offer insights into the organization of phonological knowledge in the minds of native speakers, and testify to the stability or variation of representations. We will look into theoretical approaches, empirical studies on acquisition, production, processing, and selected computational techniques such as decision trees and discriminative learning. In your theses, you will be encouraged to use quantitative and/or qualitative evidence collected from, e.g. dictionaries, corpora or participant responses (e.g. reaction times, acoustic measurements, phonostylistic processes etc.). Theses exploring the relationship between phonology and morphology/semantics are welcome.

Creative and Specialized Translation

For description of the programme, follow this link (to our website in Polish).

„Terefere, gagatku” czyli językoznawcze podejście do tłumaczenia wulgaryzmów

(“F*** you, m***f***er”: a linguistic approach to profanity in translation)

dr Anna Jelec

Description

Profanity, curses, epithets. They’re shocking. They’re offensive. They’re hurtful. But they’re also the words people use to express their strongest emotions, and that elicit the strongest physiological reactions—the fastest pulse, the sweatiest palms, the shallowest breathing. They’re regulated by censors and frowned upon in polite society. And they pose quite a challenge for interpreters and translators.

In this seminar, we take a look at these bad words through a linguistic lens. Questions we might tackle include identifying types of curse words, and whether they differ in Polish and English; asking what strategies are used to translate profanity and how they affect the message; whether cursing affects the translator (and their audiences); comparing curse word lexicons in Polish and English, the perceived acceptability of various curses in context, and others.

Bear in mind that these MA projects must have an applied aspect: create tools (such as a glossary), practical solutions (such as a how-to guide) or a resource (such as a best practice manual) for use in the translation industry or other economic and social entities.

Recommended reading

• Bergen, Benjamin. 2016. What the F. What swearing reveals about our language, our brains, and ourselves. New York: Basic Books.

Translation expertise and the dynamics of the job market

prof. UAM dr hab. Bogusława Whyatt

Description

Translation expertise is a cluster concept which captures the multitude of factors and skills needed to provide professional translation services. In this seminar we will try to dismantle the concept of expertise to see which abilities need to be enhanced to develop self-confidence needed to make decisions and choices in translation. Drawing on expertise research, we know that experts do not emerge overnight in any area, especially if the domain in which they specialise involves complex tasks. Translation is a complex task. It requires bilingual and inter-cultural knowledge and text processing skills which more and more involve the use of technology. Additionally, the dynamic changes on the job market where translators are expected to perform many translation-related tasks, such as post-editing, transcreation, localisation and revision, create new expectations which translators will have to meet. Finally, the notion of expertise in translation has a social dimension as it is granted by others, including fellow practitioners, publishing houses, associations of translators and readers of translated literature. Students who choose this seminar will select a topic of interest and work on their MA project which will contribute to our understanding of how translation expertise develops and correlates with the quality of translated texts.

Polish-English Conference Interpreting

For description of the programme, follow this link (to our website in Polish).

Peeking at interpreting professionals in PINC – what can the Polish INterpreting Corpus tell us about interpreters’ language at the European Parliament?

dr Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny

Description

This seminar is intended for students who would like to engage in empirical research to discover recurring linguistic patterns in interpreted texts.

The course introduces the students to a dynamically developing strand of empirical Interpreting Studies, which employs electronic language corpora as a major research tool. The students will learn about the key research problems currently examined in Interpreting Studies and how corpora may be applied in such investigations.

In their research projects the students will select linguistic and/or paralinguistic features of language to be explored in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of interpreted speeches to discover how top European interpreters work in one of the most challenging interpreting contexts of plenary sessions at the European Parliament.

Recommended literature

• Ferraresi, Adriano, Bernardini, Silvia, Petrović, Maja, & Lefer, Marie-Aude. 2018. Simplified or not simplified? The different guises of mediated English at the European Parliament. Meta: journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 63(3), 717-738.
• Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta, Ivaska, Ilmari, & Ferraresi, Adriano. 2023. Fluency in rendering numbers in simultaneous interpreting. Interpreting.
• Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta, Ferraresi, Adriano, Ivaska, Ilmari, & Bernardini, Silvia. 2022. Using European Parliament data in translation and interpreting research: An introduction. Mediated discourse at the European Parliament. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Olohan, Maeve. 2004. Introducing corpora in translation studies. London: Routledge.
• Shlesinger, Miriam. 1998. “Corpus-based interpreting studies as an offshoot of corpus-based translation studies.” Meta: journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators' Journal 43.4: 486-493.

Translation Psychology

dr Olha Lehka-Paul

When various forms of AI and machine translation tools are rapidly gaining popularity, and translation is becoming more and more easily accessible for everyone, it might seem unnecessary to reflect upon human translation, its nature and challenges involved in it. And yet, human translation goes far beyond the scope of what AI and machine translation can offer, as it enables the transmission of cultural, pragmatic, stylistic, affective and other aspects of an utterance. Moreover, translators are expected to be highly proficient language experts specialised in certain areas of knowledge and able to work efficiently under various forms of pressure. This proves translation to be a highly complex cognitive activity taking place primarily in the translator’s mind.

Since the 1970s, a number of translation studies scholars have been engaged in empirical research with transators as subjects so as to better uderstand how a translator is able cope with such a cognitively taxing task. This type of research falls into a broad category of Translation Psychology, which will be an overarching theme of this seminar. We will try to peek into the translator’s mind as they are producing a target text, and we will do so by placing a translator with their individual strengths and limitations, emotions and personality characteristics in the centre of our research endeavours. Participants of this seminar will be expected to conduct empirical studies devoted but not limited to such issues as the relationship between translator’s personality and translation performance, the role of translator’s self-efficacy and self-esteem, the development of the translator’s self-concept, the role of emotions and stress in the process of translation.

Note

This seminar is also available for candidates for the Written and Multimedia Translation (Tłumaczenie pisemne i multimedialne) programme, run by the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures in cooperation with the Faculty of English.