People

Translation is the bedrock upon which MLAC is built.  Though it interests most of us who work here in one way or another, we list here only those of us who teach, practice or carry out research into translation as broadly defined.  Just to keep things simple, these brief introductions are limited to translation or translation-related activities and we list only recent published books.

Click on the links to find out more.

Yael Almog (Associate Professor) specialises in linguistic, literary, and cultural transfer between German and Hebrew.  A published translator, her research in the field of Translation Studies touches on the reception of the Hebrew Bible in the German-speaking world from 1750-1950; on the role of German-Hebrew and Hebrew-German translation in the context of transnational migration in the 20th and 21st centuries; and on the incapacity of translation to fully function as equivalent to the original text in national contexts that have declared the original language dead (German in Israel, for example, or Hebrew in Germany). 

Petra Bauer (Assistant Professor, Teaching) advocates in her teaching of German language the use of translation for the learning and teaching of intercultural communication and competence.  She set up a telecollaboration project with the teaching university in Karlsruhe in 2019, works on cultural transfer in literary and factual translations, attends regular language and ICC conferences and contributes to published research. 

Alexandre Burin (Teaching Fellow) teaches translation in the first and second year core French language modules at MLAC.  He has worked on translation, especially in the works of Oscar Wilde.  More recently, he has started to work on intermedial translation in contemporary literature.

Andy Byford (Professor) is a specialist in the history of knowledge and science in Russia, especially biological, human and social sciences.  As co-lead (with Anoush Ehteshami of the transnational strand of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’), he coordinated research projects and events exploring Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese speaking transnational communities.

Dominique Carlini Versini (Assistant Professor, Teaching) teaches translation in the first and second year core French language modules at MLAC.  She explores gender in/and translation in her research, and her article “Translating Woolf: Marie Darrieussecq’s Un Lieu à soi”, which appeared in L’Esprit Créateur (2020), reflects on how contemporary debates on inclusive language in French reactivate the feminist message of Woolf’s essay in Darrieussecq’s rendition of A Room of One’s Own. 

Laura Chuhan Campbell (Assistant Professor) publishes research on the practice and concept of translation in Medieval France and Italy, paying particular attention to French and Italian Merlin stories and medieval Bible translation.  Her research, together with her experience of academic translation, informs her teaching of translation on the undergraduate programme (French Studies) and on the ‘Specialised Translation French > English’ and ‘History of Translation’ modules on the MA in Translation Studies.

Madeleine Chalmers (Teaching Fellow) specialises in modern and contemporary French literature and thought.  She is a professionally qualified translator, Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists and was Project Editor of the 2017 'Bringing Proust's Imaginary Music to Life' project (based at the University of Oxford and supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund).

Ruth Clarke (Translator-in-Residence & Part-time Teacher) is a literary translator working from Italian, French and Spanish into English.  Co-founder of the Starling Bureau translation collective, she was the first recipient of the New Writing North/Durham University translator-in-residence which involves developing activities such as workshops, talks and public engagement/participation projects centred around the Durham Book Festival and the University with the aim of encouraging an interest in literary translation and translated literature, and the valuing of languages among communities in and around Durham and the North of England. 

Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze (Professor) is a specialist of Nineteenth-Century French literature and culture (Parody), French Cinema and Creative Writing.  She is also a novelist whose creative writing engages closely with translation in that it plays with the French and English languages and features literal translations, adaptations, and quotations.

Hansun Hsiung (Assistant Professor) works at the intersection of the history of science and media history, with a particular interest in the circulation of knowledge between East Asia and Europe c. 1750-1900.  His previous articles have examined various aspects of translation, including the translation of British statistical textbooks in Japan; English missionary print in South, Southeast, and East Asia; Dutch surgical diagrams and illustrations in Japan; and the geopolitics of the legal regulation of translation rights. 

Jin Huang (Assistant Professor, Teaching) is the convenor of English <> Chinese interpreting modules and she teaches Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting, CAT Tools, Translation Ethics and Specialised Translation from English into Chinese. Jin is a full member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists and is credited as a Chartered Linguist. She works with Chinese publishing houses on literary translation and carries out research into translation process research using data elicitation methods that involve triangulating eye tracking, keystroke logging and cue-based retrospection. 

Penelope Johnson (Associate Professor, Teaching) co-directs the MA in Translation Studies and has published on translation and ideology, translation and border writing, and translation criticism. A published translator (most recently of Un largo camino a casa by Kim Dana Kupperman), she teaches translation at postgraduate and undergraduate level including modules on translation theory, history of translation, translation sociology and Specialised Translation Spanish < English.

Tina Kover (Literary Translator & Founder of Translators Aloud) is a prize-winning literary translator who has translated over 20 works of literary fiction.  A regular contributor to the Arts of Translation Masterclass Series, she is also the co-founder (with Charlotte Coombe) of the YouTube channel Translators Aloud which features literary translators from multiple languages into English reading from their own work. 

Kevin Lin, OBE (Professor in Practise) is an interpreter (Chinese) working at the top of his profession, acting as lead interpreter for the UK Foreign Office, for Queen Elizabeth and for successive UK prime ministers since the mid-1990s.  Professor in Practice at Durham since 2019 and the author of best-selling interpreting textbooks, he delivers masterclasses in Interpreting and offers work placement opportunities to students on the MA in Translation Studies.

Luca Malici (Assistant Professor, Teaching) in Italian Studies is particularly interested in on-screen translation, dubbing and subtitling, and the ways in which ideology might impinge on translated versions of audio-visual products amongst cultures. Luca has taught translation on a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses where he incorporates aspects of translation practice in his Italian language learning and teaching approach, from beginners to proficient modules.

Ita Mac Carthy (Professor) specialises in 16th century Italian literature and art and their afterlives in italophone and anglophone contexts.  Translations and relations between Italian and English and between word and image, as well as across time periods and cultures, inform her research but also her teaching on Italian Studies undergraduate modules like ‘Renaissance Relevance’ and MLAC postgraduate modules such as ‘Crossing Cultures’.

Mari Carmen Maya Medina (Assistant Teaching Fellow) has a BA in Translation and Interpreting Studies from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and a PG qualification in Legal Translating as well as a Master’s in the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language.  As well as being a professional translator, mainly of legal texts, she teaches semi-specialised translation and supervises translation projects in the MA in Translation Studies.  

Mandana Mashayekhi-Ghoyonloo (Translator and Part-time Teacher) is a poet and translator, writing both in Persian and English, whose translations from English into Persian include Leviathan by Paul Auster (Tehran, 2009), and whose self-translated poems have appeared in MPT and The London Magazine.  With her English language poetry appearing in the Steps in Time app and Newcastle Poetry Festival, she has research interests in Persian classical poetry and its influence on English Modernist poetics, as well as in the poetry of Basil Bunting and his translations from Persian literature.

Daniel Newman (Professor) conducts research into Arabic travel literature, the 19th century Muslim reform movements, Islamic medieval medicine and food history.  Within Translation Studies, he works on Arabic translation movements of the Middle Ages and the 19th century and has published a number of volumes in this area.

Claudia Nitschke (Professor) specialises in political romanticism, utopias in literature, concepts of war, fatherhood, sovereignty, and justice in film and German literature from the 18th to the 21st centuries.  Within the broader understanding of translation, she is interested in adaptation studies and intermediality, specifically filmic adaptations of literature and corresponding theories, but also in the way translation works as a specific form of intertextuality in German Romanticism.

Etsuko Okahisa (Translator and Part-Time Teacher) teaches English-Japanese translation on Durham's MA Translation Studies. Her Japanese translations include New York Times best sellers: The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen and The Latte Factor by David Bach.  She is a winner of ALC Translation Contest (Practical Category) and a runner-up in the Sapporo Intercollege Translation Competition (Fiction). 

Jessica Rainey (Translator and Part-Time Teacher) is a freelance translator from French and Spanish into English.  Specialising in creative translation (or transcreation) and literary translation, she teaches Specialised Translation (Spanish > English) on the MA in Translation Studies and contributes to the Arts of Translation Masterclass Series. 

Kim Sanderson (Translator and Part-time Teacher) is a freelance translator working from German and French into English.  Specialising in advertising, architecture and design, environment and development, she counts among her translations Le Corbusier’s Practical Aesthetic of the City: the Treatise of La Construction des villes of 1910-11 by Christoph Schnoor (Routledge). She teaches Specialised Translation German > English and runs the Translation Work Placement module on the MA in Translation Studies.

Marc Schachter (Professor) is a comparatist intrigued by how the editing, glossing, copying, printing, and translating of texts shape their reception and transmission. Current research projects consider classical reception and representations of sex between women in medieval and early modern Italy and France and the transmission of seditious texts in early modern France.  Professor Schachter’s teaching addresses the cultural political of translation as well as translation and book history through visits to Palace Green, Durham’s special collections library.

Richard Scholar (Professor) has published research in the field of translation studies with a particular focus on early modern translation French <> English.  The founding General Editor of Translatio, a book series concerned with translation in all its guises across the continents and islands of the medieval and early modern world, he has also co-translated several canonical authors including Pascal (with an international team of translators), Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson (with Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert).

Paul Starkey (Emeritus Professor) has translated around a dozen Arabic novels into English, in addition to many shorter works of prose and poetry.  Winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize (2015), and co-winner of the Sheik Hamad Translation Award (2017), he has been Chair of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature since 2004, has served as a translation mentor for the British Centre for Literary Translation, and acted as Chairman of Judges for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation on two occasions.

Don Starr (Assistant Professor, Teaching) is co-director of the MA in Translation Studies where he teaches Chinese > English translation, translation theory and the history of translation.  He supervises PhD theses in the Chinese and English translation area and teaches undergraduate literary text and classical Chinese translation.  He has long experience of commercial translation in the technical and business areas, and has translated translation-related academic texts.

Luke Sunderland (Professor) is a founding member of the research collective ‘Medieval Translation’ and has a particular research interest in the idea of translation as mediation between divergent modes of existence.  As well as enriching his research into vernacular encyclopaedias and their visual and verbal construction of knowledge, this interest informs his teaching on the ‘World Literature & Translation’ module on the MA in Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the MA in Translation Studies.

Dario Tessicini (Associate Professor) is an Honorary Fellow at MLAC and an Associate Professor at the University of Genova.  His research interests include early modern translation theory and practice which he approaches as negotiation, as competition, and as rewriting.

Michael Thompson (Professor) is an author of the 2nd edition of Thinking Spanish Translation (2009).  He designed and taught on the final-year Spanish Translation module as well as on the Specialized Translation (Spanish-English) module in the MA in Translation Studies, with a particular focus on literary translation.

Angus Turvill (Translator and Part-time Teacher) is a freelance translator of literary fiction and non-fiction as well as the editor of Heavens Wind, a dual-language anthology of short stories by leading Japanese authors.  Winner of the Shizuoka International, Kurodahan and J-Lit Translation competitions, he teaches Specialised Translation (Japanese > English) on the MA in Translation Studies.

Sergey Tyulenev (Professor) has research interests in the sociology of translation, the epistemology of Translation Studies and translation as a social activity.  Founding Editor of the Routledge Introduction to Translation and Interpreting series, he has published on translation and espionage, the social role of translation in the 18th century westernization of Russia, the role women-translators played in Russian translation history and aspects of gender and sexuality as they manifest themselves in Russian translation history.

Thomas Wynn (Professor) is a specialist of 18th century French literature, with a focus on the period’s drama and libertine writings and a special interest in the ethics of translation.  In collaboration with Will McMorran (Queen Mary London), he translated the Marquis de Sade’s novel 'The 120 Days of Sodom', which was awarded the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize in 2017.

Aziza Zaher (Associate Professor, Teaching) uses translation as a core element in her teaching of Arabic language at all levels, from beginners to advanced.  She has over 20 years’ experience of translating for international organisations (including UN institutions such as FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, UNISDR and WHO) and has recently translated Where East Meets West: Appropriating the Islamic Encounter for a Spiritual Cultural Revival by Mona Abul Fadl.

Binghan Zheng (Professor) is an expert in cognitive translation studies, neuroscience of translation, and comparative translation and interpreting studies.  As well as the director of the Centre for Intercultural Mediation, he is the secretary-general of the International Association of Translation, Interpreting and Cognition (IATIC), and chair of the Communication and Collaboration Committee for the World Interpreter and Translator Training Association (WITTA).  

Olga Zabotkina (Assistant Teaching Fellow) teaches translation in years two and four and also teaches interpreting and translation on the final year module Russian for Professional Communication.  She has extensive experience as an English <> Russian interpreter, working with the Kostroma City Council, Kostroma diocese, Durham County Council and delegations from Durham (UK) and Durham (North Carolina, USA), interpreting also at church conferences, for police and solicitors. 

We also have a number of PhD Students working on Translation Studies or Translation-related research projects in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures.