About

Gabriela Saldanha is a translation studies scholar with a distinguished trajectory who joined the School of Modern Languages and Cultures as an honorary research fellow in 2021. Gabriela is also an Associate Researcher in the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo, working on the Oslo Medical Corpus project.

Having trained as a legal translator at the Universidad de la República (UdelaR, Uruguay), Gabriela worked as research assistant in the Translational English Corpus at UMIST (now University of Manchester), and subsequently obtained a PhD at Dublin City University, Ireland. Before joining the University of Oslo as research associate, she worked as a Lecturer in Translation and Language Engineering at Imperial College London and as a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Research interests

Gabriela’s research has focused on the nature of translation as an artistic process and how translation contributes to the transformation of literary works and literatures, and to the dissemination and transformation of knowledge more widely. She developed a methodology for the study of the translator style and is currently working on a theory of literary translations as works of performance art with a social life of their own (Literary Translation as Performance Art, Routledge, forthcoming). This work has emerged as a result of a general interest in how language use shapes our knowledge of the world and how it can both restrict, challenge, and expand the work of the imagination as a social process. Gabriela has extensive experience in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and artistic research and has a particular interest in the power of research methodologies to reveal, construct and limit our knowledge(s) and imagination.

Teaching and supervision

This academic year Gabriela will deliver a Masterclass on ‘Machine Translation and Translators: Friends or Foes’ (10^th March 12 - 1pm, OC1.06) and a Seminar on Research Skills, ‘Putting the Cart Before the Horses: From a Dissertation to a Research Project’ (5th May, 2022, 12-1pm, FAB2.32)

Recent Publications

• (forthcoming, 2023) ‘Positions in research methodology’, in Marais and Meylaerts (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Concepts and Theories of Translation (under contract).
• (forthcoming, 2022) Literary Translation, a Performance Art, London & New York: Routledge.
• (in press, 2022) ‘From voice to performance, the artistic agency of literary translators’, in Mona Baker (ed.) Unsettling Translation, London and New York: Routledge.
• (2020) ‘The translator: Literary or Performance artist?’, Interpreting and Translation Journal, https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.19067.sal
• (2019) (with Mona Baker) Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, 3^rd London & New York: Routledge.

For a full list of publications, check here.

Professional Associations

• Elected Executive Council Member of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS).
• Member of the Peer College for the Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar, Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Jiao Tong University, Shanghai (www.jiaotongbakercentre.org/2017/12/17/announcement-martha-cheung-award/).
• Founding editor (with Marion Winters) and current member of the Editorial Board of New Voices in Translation Studies, a refereed online journal of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (www.iatis.org/newvoices)
• Member of the Editorial Board of the book series Approaches to Translation Studies, Brill.