We are delighted to announce the outcome of our second and final flexible funding call. Beginning in early 2019, the projects will foster innovation in research-led teaching and support curriculum change in modern languages in higher education.
The three selected projects are：
Translation as Creative Critical Practice
Dr Delphine Grass, Department of Languages & Cultures, Lancaster University
Through a series of workshops and the development of different creative translation methods across media (poetry, literature and film), this project investigates the potential for translation to stimulate creative approaches to the reading and interpretation of texts. By bringing together practising poets, writers, students and non-professional practitioners, its aims are to explore and develop the practice of translation as a method of creative-critical writing, and to design pedagogical tools for its teaching in a wide range of contexts.
The Translations of T. Ifor Rees: Approaching Welsh-Hispanic Cultural Relations in the Twentieth-Century
Dr Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, School of Literatures, Languages and Linguistics, Bangor University
The project looks anew at the literary work of career diplomat T. Ifor Rees (1890–1977) who, while best known for his Latin America travel books, lavishly illustrated with his own photographs, also left behind a rich legacy of multilingual translations (from French, English and Spanish into Welsh). Studying these will provoke new understandings of how translation across many languages influenced discourses of language preservation and the exotic, both in Welsh-language culture and further afield.
How do sign language learners’ language attitudes towards minority languages evolve over the course of learning a sign language?
Dr Jordan Fenlon, Dr Stacey Webb, Prof. Jemina Napier, Dept of Languages & Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University
This project will investigate how language attitudes displayed by sign language students at Heriot-Watt University change over the course of learning a sign language. Students will be asked a range of questions designed to elicit their opinions on sign language use before and after a deaf community placement (e.g., what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ use of sign language). Responses from different stages of the course will be compared and the impact of current teaching practices on language attitudes will be explored.
The MEITS team is looking forward to working with these projects to reinvigorate research and teaching in modern languages.
