Jason Jolley

“Collaborating to Design a Competency-based Translator Training Program”

Dr. Jason Jolley, head of the Modern and Classical Languages department, recently presented the following:

“Collaborating to Design a Competency-based Translator Training Program” at the 2018 conference of the American Translators Association in New Orleans.

The presentation focused on “an effort to collaborate with practitioners across the country to develop a competency-based translator training program.”

“It was a follow-up to an article I published in the ATA Chronicle, the main trade publication for translators and interpreters. We’re interested in identifying the core competencies that effective entry-level translators possess so that we can design a program that teaches them,” Jolley elaborated.

He added that “It was great to have such an enthusiastic audience.”

Heidi Backes

“Shared Trauma: Gothic Journeys and Historical Memory in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Bestseller The Shadow of the Wind.”

Dr. Heidi Backes, assistant professor, had her presentation proposal for “Shared Trauma: Gothic Journeys and Historical Memory in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Bestseller The Shadow of the Wind,” accepted by the International Gothic Studies Conference in Australia.

The conference is hosted by GANZA (the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia), a group of international scholars of Gothic literature and culture, and represents a range of topics about how the Gothic is used in different mediums.

Backes’s presentation focused on the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

“This novel uses the Gothic mode and images of monstrosity to represent symbolically the trauma caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which still has a haunting presence in Spanish cultural production today, some 80 years later,” elaborated Backes.

This particular conference is significant to Backes.

She further stated that “a lot of the panels dealt with my main interest in Gothic Studies: the important historical connections made between Gothic literature and sociopolitical crises in real life.”