Faruk Mardan

Profile

I worked as a professionally trained Chinese/English/Uyghur translator and conference interpreter before I joined Leeds University in 2019 as a part-time tutor, which turned into a full-time position the next year. I obtained two MAs, one in Applied Translation Studies and the other in Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies, at the University of Leeds. In my translation work, I mostly provide medical translation, as a result of the knowledge and experience gained from my BSc in Clinical Medicine. I am experienced in sports translation and techincal translation of many other subject areas. In my conference interpreting work, I mainly work in diplomatic settings and for international organisations, but also have experience interpreting in many other sectors, including cryptocurrency, medicine, manufacturing and tourism.

I am an academic partner of MultiTraiNMT, a European partnership which disseminates best practice in the teaching and research of Neural Machine Translation. 

Before my career in translation and interpreting, I taught English for 8 years in China. I speak Uyghur and Chinese as native languages and I am a native-level speaker of English. I speak Turkish at an intermediate level and I have basic understanding of Italian and French.

Responsibilities

• Module Manager of Principles and Application of Machine Translation
• CTS Admissions Rep
• Organiser of CTS Professionalisation Talks

Research interests

I have established an interest in translation pedagogy, with a particular focus on the teaching of translation into a passive language. With the increasing demand for translation, native speakers of some languages can no longer fill the gap. Translators often have to translate into their non-native languages, by choice or as a result of market demand. Teaching of translation into a passive language can be noticeably different from that of translation into a native language, which requries substantial research. I am interested in developing a unique translator skillset, such as developing judgement of native speakers, without shifting the focus on foreign language teaching.

My other research interest lies in buidling machine translation (MT) systems for under-resourced languages to improve access to information for speakers of these languages. Particularly, I am interested in how corpora can be built for under-resourced languages and the efficacy of different approaches to evaluating MT output.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

• MA Applied Translation Studies
• MA Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies
• BSc Clinical Medicine

Professional memberships

• MultiTraiNMT
• TAUS
• Paper Republic

Student education

I teach MA students in Applied Translation Studies and Audiovisual Translation Studies. Subject areas include translation technologies, machine translation and specialised EN-ZH translation. I also provide supervision and assessment of extended translation and subtitling projects (EN-ZH).