This is a fun idea. I have decided to publish here both of my academic papers (not to worry since both of them are already available elsewhere).
Let’s start with my Master’s thesis. I wrote it in roughly half a year. And since my eyes were set on getting a job at the EU institutions I decided to write something relating with the EU.
Ever since the conversations started about privacy policy I have been interested in data protection and data regulation, thus it came as no surprise that the GDPR was the answer for my main Master’s thesis topic. My field of study for my Master’s was legal text translation and translation studies; therefore, I decided to conduct a contrastive analysis between our EU’s GDPR and Australia’s privacy policy. Why Australia you may ask? They speak in English and I did not know anything about Australia’s stance on data regulation. Simply as that. To the casual observer this might seem like the most boring thing possible but to me, to be honest, this was quite fascinating to write and research.
Summary:
The title of this master’s thesis is “Contrastive Analysis of Terms from Privacy Regulating Legislation of the European Union and Australia”. The aim of this paper is to conduct a contrastive analysis of terms from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the 1988 Privacy Act (APA).
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter carries out a contrastive analysis of both legal acts and gives a brief history of how they were created, also it looks at the notion of “privacy” in point of fact. The second chapter looks into the translation of legal acts – the possible problems relating to it, the importance of a translator’s qualifications and experience as well as the importance of terminology and equivalence in translation studies. And the third chapter is dedicated to the contrastive analysis of GDPR’s and APA’s defined terms and the analysis of translation problems of legal terms that have been an excerpt
from the APA.
This paper can be used as a solid basis for a more deeper and detailed research of the APA or any other Australian legal act, and it can be used as a tool by European or Australian
translators while translating privacy-related documents for both continents.
You can read my full thesis below (unfortunately it is written in Latvian):
My Bachelor’s thesis was a completely different story. During my bachelor’s studies, I had to do an internship, and since I was particularly interested in audiovisual translation I decided to apply to a translation agency that almost only deals with the translation of movies and television series. I ended up getting the internship.
During my internship, I translated only comedy series for voice-over. Thus came the decision to use my edited translations for the research of my bachelor’s thesis. Jokes are a funny thing, but they are also quite hard to translate.
Theme: Strategies for Translating Jokes in Voice-over of Comedy Series
My thesis can be read below (it is written in English):
You often hear people saying that writing academic papers is hard, that they can’t find motivation or their research is not going anywhere. I had the complete opposite experience. When the theme was set, when theoretical and research material was compiled then it all came down to just putting words together. Yes, it helped a hell of a lot that both of my themes were truly interesting for me as the author. And that is something that I say to people who sometimes ask for guidance or advice. Just try to find something that interests you, and, of course, find something that has a lot of material for your research. Also, you need to have a solid academic advisor. I learned that the hard way.
There was a time when I thought of pursuing a Ph.D. as well. But not in translation or linguistics. I am thankful for my education but a PhD in this field would not be interesting. If I had studied STEM sciences then, yes, I would very much liked to continue my academic journey. But I am still young. Who knows. Maybe another degree is going to come. Maybe not a Ph.D., but another Master’s is very well a solid possibility.
Kind regards,
Olaaf
Comments (2)
Comments are closed.