2016 ROUND TABLE

The 2016 Round Table of the Department of Foreign Languages and Communication, a traditional yearly event in our Department, took place on February 2, 2016. Due to the increasing number of international events with a significant participation of the Department members, this became the main focus of the first part of the Round Table. 
The main presenters in the first part of the event were: Maria Alexe, Marina Rotaru and Carmen Ardelean.
Ms. Maria Alexe spoke about the inter-university cooperation with the University of Rousse, Bulgaria. Since 2007, when the first participation of our colleagues was documented, the number of Romanian participants has constantly increased. Bulgarian counterparts are also contributing to our Conferences and sending papers to be published in our Scientific Journal. Moreover, ms. Tsvetelyna Harakchiyska is now a member of the scientific committee for our Journal.

Ms. Marina-Cristiana Rotaru proposed for debate her presentation at the international conference organised, in 2015, by the International Society for Cultural History. The paper focused on the comparison of two portraits of Queen Elizabeth II: the Coronation portrait by Cecil Beaton (1953) and a later portrait made by artist Justin Mortimer in 1997 and commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) to mark 50 years of the Queen’s patronage of the RSA. The visual representations were explained both from the visual and the symbolic point of view, thus underlining different attitudes towards British royalty and its most important representative.

The participation of ms. Mălina Gurgu and ms. Elena Maftei-Golopenția with our students in international projects in 2015 was presented by ms. Carmen Ardelean; at the time, the two coordinators and the group of students were in the Czech Republic, for the current stage of the project. Our two colleagues coordinate the Romanian group of students in a strategic partnership focusing on legal translation (2015-2017) as a continuation of two Intensive Erasmus programmes (2009-2011 and 2012-2014).  This international project includes students from France, Spain, Portugal, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia, with the Czech Republic being the project coordinator.

Each stage of this project includes 2-week workshop session in which students work in multi-national groups, being involved in various activities, among which: conference interpreting, translation of legal documents, glossaries of terms from the legal and economics areas, how to write a CV and motivation letter and so on.

In October 2015 both our colleagues participated in the International Days organized by our Portuguese partner, ISCAP, and initiated discussions with potential project partners from Belgium, Spain and Portugal; they also took part in the International Conference Join In - Re-interpret the interpreting, also organized by ISCAP. Discussions that tool place during the International Days of Bretagne-Sud University were also part of the Departmentțs efforts to establish connections throughout Europe and beyond, in view of potential projects in the future.
Ms. Elena Maftei-Golopenția also participated in the International Conference Narratives of the  Crisis: Myths and Realities of Contemporary Society, which took place in Salonic, with the paper Les medias et la construction symbolique des moments de crise du milieu universitaire.
The first part of the Round Table ended with the presentation made by ms. Carmen Ardelean, about three events organized by the European Commission in Iasi, Bucharest and Brussels in the second half of 2015.

The event in Iasi, organized under the auspices of the European Commission and of the University of Iasi, focused on New Trends in Translation Studies today, and it was one of the major events included in the 2015 international FILIT festival. For this event, ms. Ardelean was invited as a keynote speaker. Another of our colleagues, ms. Oana Avornicesei, also attended the plenary talks and workshops in Iasi.

The 2015 Translation Forum organized by the European Commission in Brussels took place in late October and it included a wide range of topics, from Localisation and Risk Management, to international cooperation between translators and representatives of the industry, outsourcing and existing difficulties in the use of new technologies. For the first time, all the workshops were shown live on the internet, thus ensuring large audiences throughout Europe and the participants could comment and make suggestions in real time, on Twitter.

The RO+ Conference for Excellence in translation was organized as a duplex Bucharest-Brussels, and the Bucharest session took place in November at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Ms. Ardelean was also invited to make a speech on the topic of Localisation – a trend in translation which is now gaining recognition from both language services providers and the industry.

In the second part of the Round Table, two of our colleagues, ms. Cristina Herling and ms. Cristina Gherman were invited to present their Ph.D. theses.

Ms. Cristina Herling presented her Ph. D. thesis, to be defended in the near future, whose topic focuses on a comparison of the way in which proverbs are metaphorically rendering morals and vice in Romanian and Spanish. The similarities and differences emphasized by the presenter were the basis for an interesting discussion, and she answered various questions addressed by the participants.

Ms. Cristina Gherman presented an overview of her already defended Ph. D. thesis, made under the joint supervision of Romanian and Spanish coordinators. The subject of her thesis is Madrid during the 1980s, a time of transition towards democracy; from a cultural point of view the Spanish capital became the centre of a movement called La Movida.

Ms. Gherman’s thesis focuses on the novels written by three representatives of this trend: Julio Llamazares (El cielo de Madrid), Antonio de Villena (Madrid ha muerto) and Juan Madrid (Días contados). These three novels present a threefold dimensioning of the urban space, in which language and sexual emancipation (in the clan-city described by Villena) is doubled by a space of obsession and death – Juan Madrid) and by a nostalgic approach of the self-flagellating artist (J. Llamazares).

The Round Table ended with a Q&A session in which the two presenters provided details about their points of view and about the original elements in their theses.