Sabine BRAUN

Biography

Sabine is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on technology-assisted methods, modalities and socio-technological practices of translation and interpreting. Sabine is particularly interested in the following areas: (1) She has a long-standing interest in video-mediated interpreting, i.e. all methods and modalities of distance interpreting that involve the use of video links (‘video remote interpreting, ‘videoconference interpreting’). She has adopted discourse analytic, cognitive-pragmatic and sociological approaches, and has combined qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and inform the integration of videoconferencing technologies into professional interpreting practice as a means of improving access to public services. After being involved in an experimental project that investigated the use of simultaneous interpreting in three-way video links, Sabine led the European projects AVIDICUS, AVIDICUS II and AVIDICUS III, a series of projects that investigated the growing use of video-mediated interpreting in legal proceedings. During this time, Sabine also contributed her knowledge of video-mediated interpreting to a number of European projects focussing on legal interpreting (BUILDING MUTUTAL TRUST 2, QUALITAS, UNDERSTANDING JUSTICE). More recently, Sabine was a partner in the EU project SHIFT, which developed educational solutions for remote interpreting. Currently, she is a co-investigator in a UK-funded project on Video-Enabled Justice. (2) In relation to interpreter education, Sabine is interested in the application of educational technologies such as video platforms and 3D virtual worlds to the field of interpreting. She created a multimodal corpus of spoken English (ELISA) for pedagogical purposes, which she used to develop an approach to corpus-based interpreter eduaction in the EU projet BACKBONE. More recently, Sabine led two multidisciplinary EU projects that developed the first 3D virtual learning environment for interpreting students and interpreter clients (IVY and EVIVA projects). (3) Sabine also researches audio description, which is an important media access service for blind and partially sighted people and an emergent modality of intermodal translation. Sabine has worked on developing a theoretical framework for an in-depth understanding of audio description and is interested in the application of audio description to multimodal content analysis and in the (semi-)automatic generation of audio description. She is currently a partner in the EU H2020 MeMAD, leading WP 5 (Human processing in multimodal content description and translation). Sabine has authored over 50 publications, is series editor of the IATIS Yearbook and a member of the advisory board of the Interpreting journal (Benjamins). She has supervised over 20 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. She is currently supervising PhD students in the fields of Interpreting, Intermodal and Audiovisual Translation.