Sunday, January 13, 2008

Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education

The BAAHE annual conference took place on the 8th of December at the university of Liège. Guests were warmly welcomed with a smile, a cup of coffee or tea and a programme.
The theme of the day was "A sense of place" and Mr Graham Swift put a start to it with a plenary lecture about "The Place of Place in Fiction". This lasted until noon. This is the time at which started the parallel sessions. these were subdivided into four categories (Literature and Cultural Studies, Linguistics, English Language Teaching and Translation Studies), each having two lecturers presenting a thesis in relation to the category.
Similarly, after lunch there was a second parallel session, organised in the same way as the first, with different lecturers and thesis.
Finally, after a short break, were some of the lecturers awarded for their work during a solemn ceremony.
I went to the session about translation studies with as lecturers Yvette Van Quickelberghe and Christine Pagnoulle. The first talked about the descriptive approach in comparing translations and explicited it with translations of "to kill a mocking bird" by Horser and by Stoyanov.
The second lecturer tried to make her point about the fact that Walloon can echo Scots. To meet her goal she used Liz Lochhead's "Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off" and its translation: "Marie Reine d'Ecosse on lui a coupé la tête"

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