Lingg faculty members receive International Publication Award for translation book

Several faculty members of the Department were given the International Publication Award (IPA) for their contributions to the book, “Translation Studies in the Philippines: Navigating a Multilingual Archipelago,” published earlier this year.

Assoc. Prof. Mary Ann Bacolod, one of the book’s editors, also wrote the chapter, “On the Translatability of Filipino Modals and its Impact on Disaster Communication,” which discusses the effect English and Filipino modals denoting obligation have in expressing the importance and immediacy of evacuation. This is an expansion of her past presentation, “Of Necessity and Possibility: Understanding the Role of Filipino Modals in Communicating Disaster-Related Risks” at the Annual Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering (PAASE) Meeting and Symposium in October 2022.

Meanwhile, Assoc. Prof. Tuting Hernandez‘s chapter, “Lost for Words: The Untranslatability of Some Tagalog Words and Phrases,” narrates the supposed untranslatability of select cultural attributes and asks the readers to take a pause and acknowledge the differences between words loaded with cultural, semantic attributes. He presented his findings during the 2024 Paglulunsad at Paglalayag book launch of the book on 30 May.

The linguistic inclinations that arise after translating gender-neutral forms in Filipino are investigated in “Gender Bias in Machine Translation: The Case of Filipino-English Translation in Google Translate” by Assistant Professors Divine Angeli Endriga and Francisco Rosario, Jr. They gave an explanation of their preliminary findings in the themed panel, “Beyond Grammatical Description,” at the 5th Linguistic Society of the Philippines International Conference (LSPIC) at Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT) in 2023.

Next, Assoc. Prof. Jem Javier co-authored the chapter, “The Biblical, the Moral, and the Legal: Juxtaposing Filipino/Tagalog Translations of Biblical Passages and Local Views on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality” with Asst. Prof. Madilene B. Landicho from the UP Department of Anthropology. It explores the expression–overt or euphemized–of sex- and gender-related lexica in Filipino.

Finally, Lecturer Michael Manahan explored the dynamics of audiovisual translation (AVT) vis-a-vis the Filipino context in the chapter, “Beyond Constraints: Advancing Linguistic Consensus in Filipino Subtitling.” He regularly offers a Linguistics 197: Special Topics in Linguistics class on audiovisual translation, and his work has recently been featured in celebration of the International Translation Day.

Naidyl Isis Bautista, PhD in Lingg student and assistant professor at the UP Department of European Languages (DEL) was also given the IPA for the chapter, “A Concise History of Translation in the Philippines,” co-authored with DEL Assoc. Prof. Anna Marie Sibayan-Sarmiento.

The IPA is awarded to UP faculty, REPS, researchers, professors emeriti, and thesis students who publish articles in international peer-reviewed journals, or book/book chapters by international academic publishers and university presses.

Pagbati!