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March 2015 - January 2016
January 2010 - June 2015
Publications
Publications (55)
The extent to which the plain style is valued in Anglophone culture cannot be underestimated. Its basic premises (the virtues of clarity, economy and precision) are repeatedly extolled in writing manuals aimed at academics, public administrators and the general public; there are spoof awards to name and shame authors guilty of obfuscation; and spec...
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would become a century later, and bi-...
In Chapter Five Mendes and Bennett argue that while Mira Nair's 2012 adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 award winning novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist also places the experience of a Muslim, Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), at the centre of the narrative, this is problematicised by the compromises of adapting the complicated and morally ambiguous source...
It is something of a cliché to affirm that translations into English are almost always domestications, privileging fluency and naturalness over fidelity to the source text. However, back in the 1970s, many of Michel Foucault’s major texts, which were introduced to the English-speaking public for the first time through Alan Sheridan Smith’s translat...
Originally presented at the Graz colloquium on the Circulation of Academic Thought (December 2015) and repeated, with modifications, at the NFEAP conference on EAP and Creativity (Oslo, June 2016), this is a manifesto against the spread of empiricism in Translation Studies and the Human Sciences generally. .
A survey of the many English academic style manuals on the market (Bennett 2009) has
shown a remarkable consistency across disciplines and genres as to the qualities required
in English Academic Discourse. These include characteristics such as clarity, economy and
precision; an emphasis upon rational argument supported by evidence, with an avoidanc...
Review of Censorship, indirect translations and non-translation: the (fateful) adventures of Czech literature in 20th-century Portugal , by Jaroslav Spirk, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 190 pp., £47.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-44386-330-8
English Academic Discourse has always presented itself as a neutral vehicle of objective fact. Through the use of clearly defined terms and straightforward syntax, and the studied avoidance of forms of overt manipulation of the reader, it claims to offer a transparent window onto some pre-existing external reality. Today, however, most linguists ag...
A Discussions about the geopolitics of academic writing frequently make use of the terms " centre " and " periphery " to compare scientic practices and attitudes in dierent parts of the world. However, there are some countries that do not slot easily into either category, being positioned geographically and economically between the two and sharing...
This paper offers a historical approach to the oft-remarked differences between Portuguese and English writing styles, tracing their particularities back to the Early Modern period when Protestant and Catholic identities became differentiated not only through religious practice and dogma, but also through their attitudes to architecture, art, dress...
The term "epistemicide" was coined by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to describe the systematic eradication of Third World knowledges by "Western" science. However, even within Europe there are various epistemo-logical traditions encoded into different discourses in different languages that are now being threatened by the inexorable exp...
Today, English Academic Discourse (EAD) is the hegemonic vehicle of knowledge in the modern world, and researchers from all language backgrounds are under a great deal of pressure to publish in it. However, there exist other academic discourses in Europe that are based upon quite different epistemological paradigms and which are being increasingly...
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, was initially a vehicle of liberation from the stifling feudal mindset. Spreading from the hard sciences to the social sciences and on to the humanities, it gradually became the prestige discourse of the Anglophone world, due no d...
Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé enjoyed an immense popularity in continental Europe, including Portugal where it has been translated seven times since 1909. How can we explain this discrepancy? Could it be that the darker aspects of the play that so scandalized the British have...
The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about profound changes on the level of discourse. Through a process of grammatical metaphorization (Halliday and Martin 1993), primary experience was linguistically recons trued to create a picture of a static objective universe from which...
The overwhelming dominance of English as a lingua franca in the academic domain is having an insidious effect upon other languages, leading to the curtailment or erosion of their traditional scholarly discourses. Translators are often unwitting agents in this process, whether they are translating into or out of English. In the first case, market fo...
For some time now, the terms ‘centre’ (or ‘core’) and ‘periphery’ have been a common feature of discussions about academic writing in recognition of the many inequalities that exist in the world of scholarly publishing. One of the most significant works in this regard was Canagarajah’s 2002 book, The Geopolitics of Academic Writing, which highlight...
What is remarkable about all the accounts that make up this book is the consistency of the experiences they describe. Despite emanating from very different parts of the European landmass and from cultures with very varied political and economic histories, most of them voice, to some extent or another, the experience of being torn by contradictory i...
Traditional Portuguese historiographic discourse is a very different creature from its mainstream English counterpart. Delighting in syntactical complexity, Baroque flourishes and emotivity, it clearly does not subscribe to the empiricist paradigm that underpins most scholarly endeavour in the Anglo-Saxon world, and which has established transparen...
Given the imbalance that exists between English and other languages in research publishing today, academic translators working into English are obliged to orient their translations towards Anglo-Saxon norms and values in order to ensure acceptance by international journals. However, when the norms governing textual production in the source culture...
The overwhelming dominance of English as a lingua franca in the academic domain is having an insidious effect upon other languages, leading to the curtailment or erosion of their traditional scholarly discourses. Translators are often unwitting agents in this process, whether they are translating into or out of English. In the first case, market fo...
The notion of the " in-between " has become a common trope in the work of many translation studies scholars in recent decades. However, in 2003, Maria Tymoczko famously took issue with the term, claiming not only that the concept is incompatible with a systems view of languages and cultures, but also that it subscribes to a Romantic notion of the t...
Judging by the ominous warnings issued to students by universities in the Anglo-Saxon world 1 and the sense of moral outrage with which transgressors are pursued, the answer to that question would seem to be " very serious indeed ". In fact, Oxford University's website is unequivocal on the matter: It would be wrong to describe plagiarism as only a...
Despite the existence of many contrastive studies that have drawn attention to academic discourse practices in other cultures, the formal constitution of the discipline known as Contrastive Rhetoric may ultimately have served to reinforce the hegemony of English Academic Discourse (EAD). That is to say, by focusing upon the technical question of ho...
Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese s...
This paper presents the results of a survey of English Academic Style Manuals conducted between 2004 and 2007, designed to establish whether English Academic Discourse is sufficiently well-defined as a concept to be useful for translation research. Although, with the current emphasis on genre and disciplinary differences, it is fashionable today to...
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, was initially a vehicle of liberation from the stifling feudal mindset. Spreading from the hard sciences to the social sciences and on to the humanities, it gradually became the prestige discourse of the Anglophone world, due no d...
Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific Revolution, the moment when a whole new approach to knowledge began to take over the western world. Among the many repercussions of this great epistemological shift was the development of a new “transparent” type of discourse, felt to ref...
This paper is concerned with Prokofiev's ballet score Romeo and Juliet, as a 'translation' of Shakespeare's play, and considers the application of Prokofiev's distinct interpretation of the play in the light of the social and political context of his time. Wile the score initially seems to be quite faithful to the original text, broadly following t...
Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an immense popularity in continental Europe, including Portugal where it has been translated seven times since 1909. How can we explain this discrepancy? Could it be that the darker aspects of the play that so scandalized the British have...
The Bible has, over the years, been read from a vast array of different perspectives, and has proved a happy hunting ground for people of many disciplines. In the light of postmodern decentrings, it is natural that the focus of attention should have shifted to the text in itself, and consequently, there has been a plethora of studies aimed at inves...
Th is article does not focus upon the aesthetic function of emotion in a lit-erary or artistic work; rather, it addresses its absence in the meta-language that we use to analyse and discuss such cultural phenomena. For although emotion has been valued as an essential component of knowledge in some epistemological contexts, the overwhelming dominanc...
