Dissertations
Ongoing dissertation projects
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Antonia Baumann
What feedback reveals: Evaluating translation work and negotiating professional expectations
Feedback plays an important role in organising and evaluating professional translation work. In my dissertation, I examine the different ways in which feedback is embedded in everyday workplace practices, from explicit exchanges between actors to less visible forms of evaluation. I ask what these practices reveal about professional expectations and how such expectations are negotiated in translation workplaces.
Rather than viewing feedback simply as an exchange of information, I understand it as socially organised evaluative practices through which actors express expectations, negotiate priorities, and make professional standards visible. Feedback may be explicit and addressed to others, but can also take indirect forms, such as internal rating systems used in translation agencies. Focusing on these practices sheds light on how expectations circulate, whose assessments matter, and how expertise is recognised and negotiated.
The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork in four translation workplace settings, combining observations, interviews, focus groups and workplace documents. By bringing together social network analysis, ergonomic perspectives and research on translator norms, it explores how feedback contributes to the organisation of translation work and the negotiation of professional standards.
For related presentations and publications, see my u:cris profile.
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Daniela Schlager
Why do translators do what they do? Exploring translators' goals and agency
Why do translators do what they do? What do they want to achieve through their work, and how do they make sense of their actions? In my dissertation, I explore how translators understand and negotiate their goals in different professional and social contexts.
Rather than treating goals simply as personal motivations or predefined objectives, I understand them as part of how translators make sense of their work and actions. I examine how translators’ goals relate to their possibilities for action and how they are shaped by the social, organisational, and material contexts in which translation takes place.
Adopting an interpretive and ethnographically informed approach, the study brings individual perspectives into focus while situating them within their wider environments. In doing so, it explores how translators navigate tensions between their own aspirations and the demands and possibilities of their working contexts, contributing to a broader understanding of agency in translation.
Related presentations and publications can be found on my u:cris profile.
Past projects
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Regina Rogl
In her PhD thesis, Regina Rogl explored community translation on virtual platforms, a highly technology-mediated practice shaped by multimedial peer production and consumption in Web 2.0 as well as by new understandings of translation originating within groups of highly engaged volunteers. While there is an increasing interest in online translation as an everyday, leisure or even fun activity in translation research, we still know relatively little about how members of such communities perceive translation and what their translation practices mean to them. There has also been little research on the social role technology can acquire in such online translation communities and how this affects questions of agency.
Drawing on theoretical notions from 'technography', a microsociological approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (Rammert & Schubert 2006; Rammert 2016), this research explores how participatory translators' actions, imaginaries and the technology they use are interwoven in their translation practices – and how this affects translational agency.
To answer this question, a virtual ethnography (Hine 2000, 2015) of a self-organised group that operates via a self-developed online platform was conducted. It is also a special case in that its translation activities are not motivated by an interest in a particular type of source texts. Instead, it builds on a principle of mutual exchange of translations and its members are brought together by a common interest in translation. The data used for analysis include forum discussions, texts from the community wiki, participant observations, screenshots of the platform's interface and technical features, as well as interviews with community members.
The results of the analysis provide a multi-layered perspective on the interplay between technical structures and social practices in community translation on the web. They offer insights into the distribution of agency in a heterogeneous socio-technical translation fabric and draw a differentiated picture of the social, medial and cultural role of platform technologies in non-professional online translation.
The dissertation has been published as a monograph: Gemeinschaftsbasiertes Übersetzen im Internet: Praxen, Vorstellungen, Technik [Online Community Translation: Practices, Conceptions, Technology] by Narr Francke Attempto. For more information about the book, see the publisher's website (in German).