The research programme, Translation and Interpreting - a Meeting between Languages and Cutures, started in 1996. It involves a great variation of research topics within the domain of translation and interpreting and has an overall aim of seeing translation and interpreting as activities that are related not only to linguistic and textual aspects but to cultural, historical, social and communicative phenomena as well.
The research project is a result of a collaboration between two big and well-known Swedish universities, Stockholm University and Uppsala University. The programme regularly arranges seminars, workshops and other events. The research projects that are involved in the programme work together in smaller groups organized around the three main topics that define the structure of the research conducted within the programme: 1) Contrastive studies of textmaterial, i.e. original texts and translations of these texts, 2) Studies concerning the historical, communicative and cultural context of translation, and 3) Studies of the translation and interpreting process, with all the social, psychological, cognitive and communicative aspects that this process involves. Within the frame of the first of these dimensions, the computational linguistics research group at Uppsala University contributes with the establishing of a large multilingual corpus as well as with research on computational linguistic tools for translation and interpreting.
The languages that are studied within the programme are, besides Swedish: Arabic, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Kinnauri, Latin, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and German.
One of the important aims of the research programme is to allow doctorate students to do their thesis within the framework of an active research environment. Through the seminars and other activities, where researchers from the two universities involved regularly meet with the doctorate students as well as with scholars from foreign universities, opportunities arise to discuss work in progress across the traditional borders between institutions and disciplines. It is our hope that this might later lead to the creation of a more formalized doctoral programme.