26 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2021 women writers and decolonization achieved via recanonisation. Internationalisation A number of staff members presented papers at international conferences. Let me just give one example. Karen de Wet presented a paper at the Feminist Readings in Motion international conference (presented online by UNISA, University of Leeds, University of Helsinki, Feminist Readings Network, and LEGS). Dr Magasvaran Pather supervised the minor dissertation of Ms Lorell Cathleen Bevis, a schoolteacher in Beijing, China, as part of an online M.Ed. course. The student passed with distinction, together with a lot of praise from both the external examiner and moderator. International Translation Day (ITD) is an official United Nations day of celebration, and received this status due to active lobbying done by the International Federation of Translators (FIT), of which Prof Eleanor Cornelius is a council member. This year’s theme was “United in Translation”. The Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), a body established in terms of the SA Constitution, invited Eleanor to speak at PanSALB’s celebrations. Representing academia, her talk focused on initiatives that are underway on the African continent to unite translation associations under a global umbrella, driven by FIT. She is currently spearheading these initiatives as the African representative on the FIT council, having already established an African Forum on 22 February this year, as a precursor to a fully-fledged regional centre of FIT in Africa, akin to FIT Europe, FIT North America, and FIT Latin America. Prof Eleanor Cornelius organised a panel for the AsLing TC43: Translating and the Computer annual conference. Eleanor is the chief moderator, with Prof Alan Melby, emeritus professor of Brigham Young University in the USA, as co-moderator. The topic is “Unedited (raw) Machine Translation: Strengths and Limitations in your Use Case”, which is intrinsically a 4IR topic and theme. Eleanor and Alan managed to put together a panel of five international experts, including Markus Foti, Head of Machine Translation (MT) at the DirectorateGeneral for Translation at the European Commission (DGT/EC); Chris Jones, Head of the press unit at the European Committee of the Regions (CoR); Mary Nurminen from Tampere University, Finland; Eva-Maria Tillman, oneword GmbH, Germany; and Guillaume Denoefbourg, University of Mons, Belgium. Visiting academics Prof Andries Coetzee joined the unit of Applied Linguistics as Visiting Professor on 1 June 2021. Prof. Coetzee grew up in South Africa, studying up to Master’s level at North-West University. He then continued his studies in America, receiving his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts in 2004. From then until now, he has been working at the University of Michigan, where he is currently employed as both Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Director of the African Studies Centre. He is also Senior Advisor to the Provost in terms of African Engagement. As Visiting Professor, he will contribute to LanCSAL over the next three years in terms of research, post-graduate supervision, and seminars. Kateryna Poltorak from the Ukraine spent the month of September with LanCSAL’s unit of Applied Linguistics, under Prof Eleanor Cornelius’s mentorship and supervision as part of the international Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programme in Translation and Interpreting Technology, which is funded by the European Union and run by the Universiteit of Wolverhampton in England. Empowering and supporting staff LanCSAL consists of many early-career staff members, who require assistance in completing their doctoral degrees, producing research outputs, applying for promotion, and getting NRF rated. I have introduced a number of initiatives to assist them with these aspects of their professional development. Firstly, I introduced a semester-on/semester-off teaching model across all Applied Communicative Skills courses. These lecturers now teach their full quota for the year during one semester and nothing during the other semester, giving them the time and space to focus on research. Secondly, I have made accommodations for staff busy with their doctoral degrees, including relieving them from some of their teaching, motivating for Sabbaticals, finding and appointing more fitting supervisors or supervisory teams, assisting one or two of them to deregister as postgraduate students at other universities and register at UJ, advising on postgraduate policies, procedures, administration, and so on. These first two initiatives have been very successful, contributing in no small way to staff members finishing their doctoral degrees. This year, four LanCSAL staff members graduated and received their doctoral degrees: Dr Bongeka Selepe, Dr Tunde Koiki, Dr Ronnie Ramhurry, and Dr Thompson (Magezi) Mabunda.
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