School of Languages and Cultures

Summer Research Program - 2021 Projects

AVAILABLE PROJECTS

  1. Developing and validating written and oral proficiency tests for second language Japanese
  2. Pragmatic understanding of the interaction between person reference and sentence endings in Korean
  3. Making First Nations eDictionaries
  4. Australian and Japanese Fantastic Arts
  1. Investigation into potential impact of communication style in the speakers’ first language on their second language communication
  2. From handwritten fieldnotes to the evolution of language: The verbs of Occitan (French)
  3. Translation project: Familiar postmemory in grandchildren’s letters to victims of the 1973-1990 civic-military dictatorship in Chile

7. Translation project: Familiar postmemory in grandchildren’s letters to victims of the 1973-1990 civic-military dictatorship in Chile

Project duration:

6 weeks, 29 November 2021 to 10 January 2022

30 hours per week

Description:

Falling within the fields of Trauma and Memory Studies and Discourse Studies, this summer research project consists of producing the annotated translation (Spanish to English) of a corpus of 34 letters published in 2020 by the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. These are letters from grandchildren to their deceased grandparents who were victims of the Pinochet dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990. The translations will be annotated and the scholar will have to identify and code recurrent themes in the letters. This project is part of a study that examines the inherited postmemory discourse of current third generation Chileans after a historical traumatic memory has taken place.

Keywords: annotated translation, theme coding, discourse, postmemory, history, trauma, testimony,

Expected outcomes and deliverables:

Scholars will gain skills in translation techniques (Spanish to English), will learn how to do an annotated translation, and how to identify and code themes for research in discourse studies. They will learn about the topic of postmemory within the area of Trauma and Memory Studies; and will learn basic discourse analysis skills.

Scholars will be expected to complete the annotated translation of the 34 letters and provide a basic theme coding of each letter.

Suitable for: 

Only 3rd year students majoring in Spanish (GPA 6-7) or Honours students/ postgraduate coursework students with a CEFR B2.2-C2 level for Spanish

Number of participants required: 1

Further information: 

Please contact Dr Sol Rojas-Lizana via email