Introducing POET: areas of concentration, lines of research
The Postgraduate Programme in Translation Studies (POET, in the Portuguese acronym) was approved by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES – a national agency) in March of 2014 and started producing its first graduates in 2016. It is, therefore, a very young programme; one, however, built on a solid foundation, as it was founded out of the initiative of professors of the Department of Foreign Languages and their Literatures of the Center of Humanities at the Federal University of Ceará.
Currently POET’s staff is constituted of 13 professors, of which, 11 permanent members (among which is José Lambert, one of the founders of the discipline of Translation Studies), and 2 collaborator members. A complete list, with a curriculum-vitae, research areas of interest, and contact details can be seen in Staff Profiles.
The Programme has currently one Area of Concentration, Processes of Retextualization, within which students can pursue research in two main lines: (1) Theory, Critic and History of Translation and (2) Translation, teaching/acquisition of foreign languages and new medias.
The Area of Concentration, Processes of Retextualization, is deliberately ample without being generic: it seeks to investigate the overarching phenomenon of the translation of texts (here in the broadest definition) across cultures, times, languages and medias. Translation thus being the subject and the object of the retextualization process insofar as it promotes a textual and discursive change of an oral or written text. We believe this Area of Concentration is therefore able to accommodate the diverse research interests of our researchers and students who come from different academic and professional backgrounds. This is in line with the aim of our programme of welcoming diversity and originality in the pursue of research excellence.
Within this Area of Concentration, the first line of research, (1) Theory, Critic and History of Translation, includes projects that deal with the multifaceted phenomenon of translation as framed by historic, ideological and cultural aspects. Although many projects pursued in this line naturally deal with literary translation or translation of written texts, it is broader in its scope, also accommodating projects dealing with oral and non-verbal texts. Students are expected to master and be conversant with an array of translation theories so as to be able to engage critically with them, and to apply them in different critical approaches, translation analyses, translation critic, and the history of translation.
The second line of research in the Area of Concentration, (2) Translation, teaching/acquisition of foreign languages and new medias, includes research projects that deal with the practice of translations, the production of glossaries and the use of corpora based approaches to translation, the use of translation in the teaching and acquisition of foreign languages, the study of cognitive processes in translation, the development and the study of technological resources in translation. Translation from this point of view can be investigated through new theoretical and methodological paradigms. Students pursuing research in this line are expected to master and be conversant with linguistic approaches to translation. Since this area deals with translation in teaching and acquisition of foreign languages, it is ideal for, though in no way restricted to, students with a background in language teaching.
