Dr Sofia Malamatidou MA

• PgCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Fellow), Higher Education Academy, 2017
• PhD Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, 2013
• MA Translation and Interpreting, University of Manchester, 2010
• BA English with a minor in Greek studies, University of Athens, 2009

After completing my studies at the University of Athens, I moved to the UK to continue to postgraduate level. I completed my PhD (2010-2013) at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Mona Baker. I joined the University of Birmingham in 2013.

During my PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant on the Translational English Corpus, where I was responsible for the maintenance and further expansion of a corpus of English translated texts, under the supervision of Professor Mona Baker. My contribution to the development of the corpus has been considerable in the two years that I participated in the project: it grew by 2 million words in the first year and by 5 million words in the second year.

In my academic career so far, I have undertaken a number of administrative roles, and I am currently the Senior Admissions Tutor for the Department of Modern Languages.

As a researcher, my essential aim has been to understand the role that translation plays in inter-cultural communication across a wide range of text types and contexts, be it literature, popular science, or tourism. My examinations typically focus on large quantities of text (i.e. corpora) and comparisons across translated and non-translated texts regarding a range of linguistic features. This is reflected in my most recent monograph, Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Routledge, 2017). Recently, my research has focused on multilingual data from a range of languages (French, Spanish, Greek, Russian, and German) to shed more light into how translation operates between and across languages.

MA Translation Studies (campus):

• Translation Technology
• Translation in a Professional Context
• Practical Translation (Greek)
• Specialised Translation (Greek)
• Contemporary Translation Theories
• Research Methods and Critical Commentary Skills

MA Translation Studies (distance):

• Translation Technology
• Professional Context of Translation
• Introduction to Translation Studies (Greek)

I welcome applications from PhD students in any of my areas of interest, especially the following:

corpus-based translation studies in general
translation and language change (esp. use of diachronic corpora in translation studies)
translation of tourism texts
translation of visual material
Past and current PhD projects include:
Edward Clay, ‘Understanding Translation as a Site of Contact-Induced Language Change in the Field of Migration’
HAH, ‘A Corpus-Based Investigation of Translator Style in the Translations of Roger Allen and Denys Johnson-Davies’
Waleed Ahmad Othman, ‘A Systemic Functional Model for Investigating Explicitation Phenomena in Translation: Two Case Studies of English-Arabic Translations’

Find out more - our PhD Translation Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Current projects

My current major research project, Translating Tourism: A multilingual exploration of the language of promotion, has one main aim: to understand how tourism destinations are promoted through translation. This is achieved by focusing on the most prominent linguistic features associated with promotional language on tourism websites. The project aims to reveal how such features might differ cross-linguistically, what they reveal about how we interpret the world, and how the differences are negotiated in translation.

I am also interested in how visual material is treated in translation, as well as how we might develop multimodal corpus-based methods for their investigation.

With Jim Clarke and Benet Vincent, I worked on the project titled Development of a Parallel Translation Corpus of A Clockwork Orange, examining Nadsat, the invented language in the novel, working out what it is made of, how it functions, and whether it can be translated. My contribution involves the examination of a multilingual parallel corpus of the novel and explores the relationship between creativity and translation, through the lens of contact linguistics.

My other major research project focused on the examination of the relationship between translation and language change, combining for the first time historical and comparative linguistics and translation studies, and using both diachronic and synchronic corpora.

Research interests

An essential element of my research is that it is interdisciplinary, combining linguistics and translation studies, with corpora as a common denominator. At the same time, I am interested in exploring how this combination might find applications in different fields, including literature, digital humanities and the tourism and travel industry. I am very happy to discuss possible supervision or collaboration, or to respond to questions about any aspect of my work.

Methodological investigation is also at the centre of my recent monograph, Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Routledge, 2017), which introduces a new methodological framework, based on the combination of corpora, for the linguistic analysis of translated and non-translated texts.

Methodological investigation is also at the centre of my recent monograph, Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Routledge, 2017), which introduces a new methodological framework, based on the combination of corpora, for the linguistic analysis of translated and non-translated texts.

• Chair of the Social Media and Outreach Committee for the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS).
• External Examiner for the MA Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Manchester.
• I have experience as a free-lance translator and copy editor.