Faculty of Arts and Humanities | University of Macau

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: 'Translators in the AI Era: Upholding Core Values and Pursuing Continuous Improvement (在人工智能的浪潮中堅守初心，不斷提高自己)
2025-05-03 17:00 - 18:00 UTC | E2-G012
Abstract:
The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the translation industry, making human-machine collaboration the new standard. In this new landscape, both translation education models and the working methods of translators must evolve to meet emerging demands. This lecture will explore two key areas: firstly, the reform and expansion of translator training programs, and secondly, the critical importance of the translator’s “attitude positioning”
(“態度定位”). Establishing a clear stance is crucial for every translator engaged in international communication and represents the core value of human translation itself. Through case studies and examples, the lecture will offer insights for practitioners and students, helping them navigate the opportunities of the AI era while upholding professional integrity and becoming competent language service providers.

Speaker Biography:
Prof. Zhang Meifang is Emeritus Professor of the FAH, University of Macau. During her working years at the University of Macau, Prof. Zhang was the major creator and coordinator of the MA programme of Translation Studies. She also served as head of the Department of English, and Master of Cheong Kun Lun College. Her research interests include discourse and functional approaches to Translation Studies, media and political discourse and translation, translation and intercultural studies. Prof. Zhang is a founding member and leader of the Macau Federation for Translators and Interpreters. She is an expert member and council member of the Chinese Translators・Association, council member of China Association for Comparative Study of Chinese and English, and executive member of the APTIF Joint Committee. She was Co-editor in Chief of Babel: International Journal of Translation (2017-2020), and is serving on the editorial boards of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, Chinese Translators Journal, and several other refereed international and national journals of translation studies.

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: 'The Coping Tactics of Interpreting (口譯的藝術與應對策略)'
2025-05-03 17:00 - 18:00 | E2-G012
Abstract:
Professor Zhong views interpreting as both a technique and an art. Drawing on extensive experience as both a practitioner and educator, he will explore the interplay between technical skill and artistry in the field. The discussion will focus on how interpreters, in practice, leverage their skills, techniques, and linguistic abilities to navigate dilemmas, resolve difficulties, achieve communicative goals, and successfully complete their assignments.

Speaker Biography:
Professor Zhong is a leading figure in interpreting and translation studies, language service studies, and foreign language education. He is celebrated as a pioneer and advocate for professional education in translation and interpreting, having played a key role in establishing degree programmes such as the Bachelor of Translation and Interpreting (BTI), Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI), and Doctor of Translation and Interpreting (DTI).
From May 2017 to October 2023, Professor Zhong served as Co-President of Kingold Group and President of Kingold Academy. Before his tenure with Kingold Group, Professor Zhong made significant contributions as President of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS).
As an author of over 100 books and research papers, Professor Zhong remains a prolific academic and Ph.D. supervisor. His ongoing research and teaching focus on interpreting and translation studies, foreign language education, and language service studies. He is an active Distinguished Chair Professor at Macau Metropolitan University and continues to supervise Ph.D. students and publish papers.
Professor Zhong has served on numerous national and provincial advisory boards, significantly contributing to the advancement of foreign language education and professional translation and interpreting education in higher education. His extensive work has earned him numerous accolades and recognitions, including prestigious awards and international honorary titles.
His international impact is further highlighted by honorary recognitions such as Honorary Fellow of the University of Warwick, and Doctor of Letters from the University of Central Lancashire, the University of Westminster, and the University of Coventry, acknowledging his vast contributions to the field.

"The Sixth Workshop on Sentence-final Particles"
2025-05-24 08:00 - 2025-05-25 18:00 | E21-3118

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: "Teaching-based Research in Translation and Interpreting Education"
2025-08-22 16:00 - 17:00 | E21-1042
Abstract:
Teaching-based research is highly applicable in translation and interpreting (T&I) education, addressing context-specific pedagogical challenges through practice-focused inquiry. T&I classrooms face unique issues like cultural expression gaps, real-time performance hurdles, and specialized terminology mastery—problems requiring tailored solutions.
Action research enables instructors to refine strategies via iterative plan-do-study-act cycles, using classroom feedback to adjust teaching methods. Mixed-methods approaches combine quantitative data (e.g., performance metrics) with qualitative insights (e.g., learner reflections) for comprehensive outcome analysis.
Case studies of student work in simulated T&I scenarios highlight curriculum needs. By anchoring research in classroom realities, educators develop targeted interventions, bridging theory and practice to better prepare students for professional T&I contexts.
Biography:
Professor Li Shuying holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Education from the University of Alberta, Canada. Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Faculty of Education at Shenzhen University. Professor Li is an awardee of the National High-Level Talent Program from the Ministry of Education.
He holds several concurrent positions, including Visiting Professor at Edge Hill University (UK) and selected expert for the “Program for the High-Level Overseas Cultural and Educational Experts” of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA), Ministry of Science and Technology, hosted at Renmin University of China.
Additionally, he serves as a Specialist for the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications (HKCAAVQ), Honorary President of The Belt and Road National Education Promotion Macao Association, and Vice President of the Guoxue (國學) Education Research Society, under the China Confucius Studies Association.
Professor Li has extensive experience, having held teaching, research, and mid-to-senior level university management positions in numerous public and private higher education institutions across Canada, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao Special Administrative Region, and in various cities in Mainland China, including in Guangdong province, Changsha (Hunan), and Nanjing (Jiangsu).

FAH-DENG: 'Crossing Boundaries: Reflections on Leading Transdisciplinary Research for Sustainable Food Systems'
2025-10-03 16:00 - 17:30 | E21A-3118
Abstract:
In recent years, I have had the opportunity to lead and participate in cross-disciplinary projects that bring together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to address global challenges in food, health, and sustainability. In this talk, I will reflect on my own experience of working with colleagues across fields such as environmental science, linguistics, aquaculture, nutrition, computer science, and political ecology in a project on aquatic food perceptions in Vietnam. Leading such a diverse team taught me the importance of building trust, negotiating different disciplinary languages, and creating a shared framework where cultural perspectives are valued alongside quantitative evidence. Through this process, I came to appreciate how humanities-led approaches can illuminate aspects of food, identity, and health that numbers alone cannot capture. My reflections will highlight both the challenges and the rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration (e.g. publications and further project collaborations), and how culturally informed leadership can shape research agendas that strengthen sustainable food practices, ecological resilience, and public health.
Biography:
Dr. Saihong Li (University of Stirling, UK) is a co-editor of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice and a book series editor for Routledge Studies in Global Food Translation. Her publications include monographs and refereed journal articles on themes ranging from menu translation to bi/trilingualism. Her current research spans four interlinked areas: food and tourism translation; translation and cultural perspectives on One Health; translators’ and interpreters’ mental health using multimodal experimental methods; and political and cultural discourse translation. Widely published and an active editor, Dr. Li has secured major funding, received multiple awards, and regularly delivers invited lectures and keynotes at international conferences.

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: "Australian Literature on Fire"
2025-10-10 16:00 - 17:00 | E21A-G038
Abstract:
Fire is a major determinant for life in Australia. The seasonal and spasmodic quality of Australian rain and the hot dry air masses that form in the central arid regions provide the conditions for bushfires in the dry months. Australian literature reflects the recurrence of fire in various ways, most obviously in providing narratives with their moment of extremity and climax.

As a limit moment within the Australian settler imaginary, fire has always signified a certain terrifying terminus in its literary representations. But this quality has varied with time and Australian literature captures these qualitative changes. In the early settler literature, fire represented the terrible return of Australian strangeness, which had been violently pushed away by the settler project. These fires wipe away the daily achievements of settler colonialism, burning houses to the ground and wiping out crops, animals, fences and families. During the world wars of the twentieth century, Australian literary fires took on the quality of explosions on a battlefield or, indeed, the immolated atmosphere of Hiroshima. In the twenty-first century, fires in Australian literature are the grim face of the Anthropocene, as fire seasons lengthen in time and spread to areas no longer wet enough to withstand their onslaught.
Biography:
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is Professor of English and Literary Studies and Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has written extensively on the relationship between Australian literature and the environment. His books include Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017), which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship, and Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (MUP, 2001), which won the Ernest Scott and WK Hancock prizes for Australian history. His most recent book is Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era (UWAP, 2024).

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: "The Uses of Aestheticism in Contemporary Literature"
2025-10-24 14:30 - 16:00 | E21A-G038
Abstract:
Over the past forty years literary studies have not been very kind to the idea of aesthetic autonomy. As our field moved away from its formalist roots in order to focus on literature’s social and ideological entanglements, it has also grown deeply suspicious of claims to aesthetic detachment in their many guises, from Kantian disinterestedness to Oscar Wilde’s celebration of the aesthetic as a sphere outside the reach of moral judgment, and further to the New Critical understanding of the literary text as a self-contained object. More often than not, such claims are seen as distracting or disingenuous, an expression of a certain kind of Western bourgeois habitus that aim to obfuscate the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. In this talk, extracted from my new book project, I argue for a more complex political genealogy behind autonomist literary doctrines: rather than a mere expression of a certain kind of solipsism that we tend to associate with such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, or Oscar Wilde, the demand for aesthetic autonomy constitutes an inherently oppositional gesture, a form of refusal typically directed at hegemonic social forces and naturally affiliated with various forms of marginality and dissidence. To fully appreciate aestheticism’s dissident potential, in this talk I focus on aesthetic detachment’s productive second life among immigrant and exiled writers, among Holocaust survivors and postcolonial intellectuals. I pay particular attention to the work of the Serbian-Jewish writer Danilo Kiš in order to demonstrate how familiar Baudelairean and Wildean assumptions can be retooled to for the purposes of Holocaust representation and political critique in socialist Eastern Europe.
Biography:
Aleksandar Stević is assistant professor of English at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Primarily a historian and theorist of the novel, he is the author of Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the editor of several volumes, including a forthcoming special issue of Genre on Aestheticism Now. His essays have appeared in such venues as New Literary History, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and ELH. He is also the Serbian translator of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and has recently completed a book on the afterlives of aestheticism in twentieth-century literature.

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: "From Technological to Digital Reproducibility: Teaching Literature in the Age of A.I"
2025-11-06 16:00 - 17:30 | E21A-G038
Abstract:
Since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, intense debates have emerged within the humanities—and literary studies in particular—concerning the practice of teaching literature at universities. In this talk, I will explore these debates through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “technological reproducibility,” developed during the 1930s to describe the emergence of photography and film.
Today, much digital content—including digitized literature—is instantly reproducible, transmissible, and marketable via online platforms and networks. Literary texts can also be repurposed as training data for Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, which may then be used by writers and students to generate new content. These developments raise critical questions: Is digital reproducibility fundamentally different from what Benjamin termed technological reproducibility? And if so, what are the implications not only for the teaching of literature but also for literature itself?
Biography:
Angus Nicholls is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Myth and the Human Sciences (2015), Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic (2006), Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought (co-edited with John Davis, 2017), and Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (co-edited with Martin Liebscher, 2010). He was formerly co-editor of the journals History of the Human Sciences (Sage) and Publications of the English Goethe Society (Routledge). His current book project is a presentist history of Comparative Literature as an academic discipline, focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century.

FAH-DENG: "AI, the Spectacle, and Marx: Who is using the tech and for what purposes?"
2025-11-21 11:00 - 12:30 | E21A-3118
Abstract:
Marx urged the proletariat not to rally against new kinds of machines per se, even if at first glance fears arose that these could further their subjugation and alienation. Rather, the point is who is deploying these technologies, and for what purposes. Behind the spectacle and moral panic about the new, there may be something very familiar, once we look more closely.
Fears of new machines and new technologies have been around for as long as they have emerged, with worries about the changes and dangers they will bring, and moral panics about the effects on people and society. There were early fears about the train, about physically riding it, but also about this new kind of mobility in society. There have been moral panics about all new kinds of media, such as books and television, each imagined to lead to delinquency and moral decline. Fears of the computer in the 1950s were perhaps the start of some of the spectacular fears we have about AI now, with imaginaries of human-mechanical hybridity and technological autonomy (Grenham, 2020). Although these were also rooted in wider fears about the new technologies of science and medicine, viewed through a trope of a ‘violation of the natural order’ (Carroll, 2004, p. 40). The ‘overreacher plot’ is well-trodden in science fiction and horror, where the scientist extends the boundaries of the natural and thereby creates a monster (Carroll, 2004, p. 118).
Following the advice of Marx, Critical Discourse Studies scholars have an important role in regard to AI. We need to look beyond the spectacle, the wild fantasies and moral panics, and consider carefully where this new technology is being deployed in a concrete sense, by whom, and for what underlying aims. And as is the job of CDS, to consider the effects of this on knowledge, on society and the wellbeing of people. In this talk I look at one small, yet concrete, case of using AI to manage levels of theft in stores in Japan. I use this to consider some of the kinds of questions we might, in the humanities, need to be asking.

Biography:
Gwen Bouvier (PhD, University of Wales) is a Distinguished Professor at Shanghai International Studies University, Institute of Language Science. Her main research interests are digital communication and civic debate on social media. Professor Bouvier’s publications have drawn on critical discourse analysis, multimodality based on social semiotics, and online ethnography. She is the Associate Editor for Social Semiotics and Book Review Editor for Discourse & Society, and the Journal of Multicultural Discourses. Her latest publications include the book Qualitative Research Using Social Media (Routledge, 2022) and the articles Cancel Culture and Trigger-Ready Fragmented Interest Groups (TV and New Media, 2025); Social Media and the New Canon of Use for Social Protests (Discourse, Context and Media, 2025); and Evaluating the American-Chinese Trade War on Chinese Social Media: Discourses of nationalism and rectifying a humiliating past (Critical Discourse Studies, 2025).

FAH-DENG: "Workflow Matters: Comparing Human Translators and Multi-Agent LLMs in Literary Translation"
2025-11-21 16:00 - 17:00 | E21A-G049
Abstract:
The lecture explores how translation workflows affect performance in both human and AI literary translation. Large language models (LLMs) perform well in general translation but often struggle with literary nuance and coherence. Professional human translations are compared with two multi-agent LLM systems: one modeled on human practice with drafting and revision phases, and another redesigned for LLM capabilities with specialized agents for planning, style, and coherence. Expert evaluations show that both AI systems achieved accuracy comparable to human translators. The LLM-oriented workflow produced more stylistically rich and fluent translations, occasionally with creative additions, whereas the human-modeled workflow was concise but less cohesive. The findings suggest that workflows optimized for LLM capabilities can yield exceptional literary translations and, in certain aspects, surpass human performance.

Biography:
Kanglong Liu is Associate Professor in the Department of Language Science and Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on empirical approaches to translation studies, translation pedagogy, corpus-based translation research, and Hongloumeng translation studies. His work has appeared in leading journals such as Target, Perspectives, Lingua, Language Sciences, International Journal of Specialised Translation, System, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. He serves as Associate Editor of Translation Quarterly, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (SSCI and AHCI), and Heliyon (SCI). He is the author of Corpus-Assisted Translation Teaching: Challenges and Issues (Springer, 2020) and co-editor of several volumes, including Translation and Interpreting in the Age of COVID-19 (Springer, 2023), Dream of the Red Chamber: Literary and Translation Perspectives (Routledge, 2023), Corpora in Interpreting Studies: East Asian Perspectives (Routledge, 2023), and Translation Studies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Routledge, 2025).

FAH-DENG Guest lecture: "Emotion Recognition and Textual Representation in British Novels from a Digital Humanities Perspective"
2025-12-04 09:30 - 11:00 | E21A-3118
Abstract:
This study examines British novels from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, exploring innovative applications of digital humanities methods in literary emotion research. First, we constructed an automated emotion recognition pipeline based on the NRC Emotion Lexicon, covering large-scale corpora to perform precise extraction and quantification of emotion words from original novel texts. Second, we conducted genre-level emotion trend analysis across two hundred years of literary history. Finally, we extracted scenes with the highest density of emotion words in individual works, supplemented by close reading analysis. Through multi-dimensional visualization and various secondary metrics, we not only delineate temporal changes in emotions such as anger across dimensions of length, frequency, and intensity, as well as the lexicon of emotion-bearing words in specific works, thereby providing evidence for comparative studies of how different authors represent the same emotions. This research demonstrates how digital humanities can provide new perspectives on emotion history and pathways for textual representation in the history of British novels.

Biography:
Dr. Haifeng Hui (惠海峰) is Professor of English, and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. He researches children’s literature from diverse theoretical perspectives, including narratology, stylistics, adaptation studies, and digital humanities. He serves as an Advisor Board member of International Research in Children’s Literature. Haifeng’s recent publications include Adaptation of British Literary Classics for Children (Peking University Press, 2019), “Canon Studies in China: Traditions, Modernization and Revisions in the Global Context,” Poetics Today (2021), “Embedded Mental States in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and Uneven Distribution of Narratorial Attention,” Orbis Litterarum (2023), “What Can Digital Humanities Do for Literary Adaptation Studies: Distant Reading of Children’s Editions of Robinson Crusoe,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2023).
