Research staff in the School all share an interest in the cross-over of language, translation and media in a multilingual framework. The different standpoints from which they approach the interaction between language and forms of communication constitute complementary and mutually enriching perspectives, in line with UEA’s tradition of interdisciplinary research. They include:  

• translation studies
• cross-cultural pragmatics
• intercultural and interlanguage pragmatics
• critical linguistics and discourse analysis (including appraisal theory)
• discourse history, memory and culture
• language and globalisation
• psycholinguistics - computer modelling of morphology
• language and museology
• language in new media
  
   

Current and developing research strands in the School include

Cross-cultural communication and translation. Domains of particular interest include

• the pragmatics and translation of conflict language
• intercultural transfer in news translation
• linguistic and cultural representations in film subtitles

Stage translation and adaptation in performance, bridging expertise in French language and literature with Translation Studies; co-host of a JISC international email discussion forum called STRAP (Stage Translation Research Adaptation Practice.

Application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (particularly Appraisal Theory and related approaches) to the analysis of attitudinal expression and subjectivity in a variety of discourse contexts: news discourse, children's literature and translation, advertising (e.g. property advertising), and clinical discourse.

Cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research into oppositional talk, based on the LCS/UEA corpus of native and no-native L1 and L2 French and English data lodged with the FLLOC UK online archive.

Intercultural identity and interfaith dialogue from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and the theory of polyphony.

Museology, text and intra- and interlingual representations - AHRC fellowship bid for 2012: project on changes in cultural memory in its relation to "glocalized" identities, involving a comparison of museum presentations in the UK (Norwich, and Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk) and Germany (Detmold).
 

International events organised by the School
 

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads III:

Impact: Making a Difference in Intercultural Communication

Wednesday 26 – Friday 28 June 2013

The conference builds on the success of two prior Cross-cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads conferences at the UEA - Speech Frames and Cultural Perceptions in 2006, and its larger-scale follow-up Linguistic and Cultural Representations across Media in 2011 -, this time with an even more ambitious agenda.

Like its forerunners, CCP III will be interdisciplinary, and aims to bring together, under the umbrella of cross-cultural pragmatics, researchers from domains which are particularly sensitive to cross-cultural issues, to promote the cross-fertilization of practises, ideas and theoretical approaches, and explore key concerns associated with communication across language and culture boundaries, in practice and theory.

Making a difference, the impact theme of this third meeting, will tap into, and confront, two closely related spheres of research activity in intercultural communication:

• Research in its value and contribution to wider society, i.e. the pursuit of research that makes a difference and ways of making it applicable and available to those for whom it can make a difference
• Research in its investigation of factors that impede or promote communication, understanding and respect for otherness in multicultural/globalised settings
   

Further details are available on the conference website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/ccp3

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads II:

Linguistic and Cultural Representations across Media

29 June – 1 July 2011

In the summer 2011, the School hosted its second interdisciplinary cross-cultural pragmatics conference – ‘Cross-Cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads II: Linguistic and Cultural Representations across Media’ - as a follow up to a 2006 very successful event (details below).

The conference is the fourth in a sequence of related events that also include “Les enjeux de la communication interculturelle” in Montpellier  (France) (Université Paul Valéry, Christine Béal et al.) in 2007 and “Cross-culturally speaking, speaking cross-culturally” in Sydney (Australia) in 2009 (Macquarie University, Bert Peeters et al.).

Further details are available on the conference website at http://www.uea.ac.uk/ccp2.

Other main past events: 

• Cross-Cultural Pragmatics conference on speech frames and cultural perceptions (Nov 2006) (resulting publication - special Cross-cultural Pragmatics issue of the Journal of French Language Studies (20.1), guest editor M.-N. Guillot, Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Conference on Stage Translation (July 2007) (resulting publication – volume of selected papers Staging Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, eds Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella, Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 

 

More about the school

The School has interdisciplinary links with other specialisms at UEA, including Literary Translation and the The British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) to which four of its members are affiliated (Roger Baines, Marie-Noëlle Guillot, Andreas Musolff, and Alain Wolf), the School of Literature and Creative Writing, Film and Television Studies, Politics, Computer Science, Philosophy and Music.

Our postgraduate students edit UEA's Norwich Papers, issues of which are devoted to translators and translation.

International links: Collaboration in Research on Translation, Intercultural Pragmatics and Metaphor Theory with the Universities of Hamburg, Heidelberg, E.L.T.E. (Budapest), and Strasbourg.

Staff individual interests and projects

Dr Roger Baines

Stage translation research network; Performance-based translation; Cross-cultural transfer in news reporting of football; Subtitling of insults. 

Dr Carlos de Pablos

The sociopragmatics of gratitude: contrastive study of perceptions between English and Spanish native speakers; cultural representations of speech acts in film subtitles and their relationship to politeness theories.

Dr Marie-Noëlle Guillot  

Cross-cultural pragmatics, with particular application to translation and issues of linguistic and cultural representations in film subtitles; text, museology and intra- and interlingual representations, interlanguage and issues of pragmatic discrimination.   

Dr Clive Matthews

The recognition of gender writing and non-native writing in anonymised coursework; The interpretation of sexual terminology in minority cultures; Systematising minds of composers and musicians vs non-musicians.

Prof Andreas Musolff

Metaphor Theory as the meeting point for Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, Cross-cultural and -lingual comparison of stylistic choices in museum and media presentations of history and of its public reception, History of Functional Linguistics (Bűhler – Jakobson - Halliday).

Dr Gabrina Pounds

Empathy as "appraisal": developing a new discourse-based analytical technique for identifying and measuring doctors’ empathic response in doctor-patient interaction; the analysis of “appraisal” options in the discourse of the housing market. The realisation of affect in TV news reporting. Potential for cross-cultural comparison (particularly UK/Italy) in all three areas.

Dr Alain Wolf

Intercultural communication and interfaith dialogue; Intercultural pragmatics with particular reference to the expression of subjectivity in second language development; Recovery of inferences in translated literary texts, specifically in the areas of stage translation and film adaptation; Relationship between ideology and symbolism in the translation of religious discourse.

Details of individual researchers can be found on the People pages.