Dr Jun Yang is a Lecturer in English-Chinese Translation and Interpreting. Her research centres on online collaborative translation which broadly includes crowdsourcing translation and fan translation.
My research centres on online collaborative translation which broadly includes crowdsourcing translation and fan translation. I apply interdisciplinary methods that enables the examination of the phenomenon from multi-dimensions – the community building, processes, and quality of translation in these contexts.
I am also interested in translation pedagogy and translation technology. I’m currently working on a project which aims at building translation learners’ revision competence. This pilot study will be expanded to the field of machine translation post-editing.
How did you become interested in the field?
I become interested in languages and cross-cultural communication in my undergraduate study, during which I came across an online amateur community called Yeeyan. I was fascinated with the wide range of texts the community have been translating and disseminating. Online collaborative translation has become an evident phenomenon as opposed to professional translation. Research in this topic is significant in diversifying the focus of current translation studies and enriching it to a more general coverage.
How did you come to work at Swansea University?
I did my Master and PhD in University of Leeds, during which my passion in translation accelerated. I worked as a research fellow in South China Normal University after my PhD. I joined Swansea University in the summer of 2020, hoping to develop strong research projects with wide impact.
What do you hope to achieve with your research?
Online collaborative translation is often criticised for low quality or exploitation of labour. I hope to build literacy around online collaborative translation and to find ways to better incorporate the approach in translation production both ethically and efficiently.
As the development of artificial intelligence is inevitable and is penetrating in every aspect of content production, translation is a field that been influenced significantly. For my research on revision and post-editing, hopefully by understanding the building of learners’ revision competence, it will shed light on translator training in the AI age.
What practical applications could your research have?
My research on online collaborative translation provides empirically-informed suggestions on how to promote community building and how to enhance its organization and application. The other project on revision and post-editing helps prepare learners with the necessary competences and skills to adapt to the revolution of the industry. Both research strands aim to optimise the existing approaches for translation production which can be better used to meet the growing needs for translation.
What is next for your research?
I plan to extend my research on online collaborative translation to the field of audiovisual translation, which will emphasise the technologies involved in production and circulation, and translation as communication that caters for the needs of accessibility, promptness and even entertainment.
To further the research on translation revision and post-editing, the next step will be a large-scale experiment looking at the influence of training approaches, the learners’ attention distribution and the variances of their performance.