Kaisa Koskinen receives award for her wide-ranging translation research
According to the reasons for awarding the prize, Koskinen is open to different theories, methodologies, topics, and fields of research. She has drawn on translation practices, her own experiences, and the feelings and debates of the translators’ community to inform her research. This openness has made her one of Finland’s most versatile and wide-ranging translation scholars.
Koskinen’s core areas of expertise are the ethics and sociology of translation. She has studied, among other things, the spaces of translation, affects, translator training, retranslation, and the translation practices of institutions such as the European Commission and Tampere City Council. She has also studied the translation of endangered languages — even in Karelian — and has done ethnography, translation analysis, archival research, and cooperated with museums. This interdisciplinary collaboration is her particular strength.
Koskinen has also found time for researcher training, for example as the Director of Langnet’s national doctoral programme Multilingualism and Expert Communication and as a founding member of the International Doctorate in Translation Studies network (ID-TS).
She has also inspired degree students to engage in research. A good example of this is the ‘Kielikudelmat’ (Woven Languages) exhibition about the languages spoken in the Finlayson old textile factory area in the past and the present. Some 50 students from different disciplines at Tampere University participated in this endeavour in the spring of 2019.
In addition to working as a professor, Koskinen is the Head of the Language Studies Unit at Tampere University’s ICT Faculty. She has also worked as a professor at the University of Eastern Finland.
“It is a pleasure to award Kaisa Koskinen. She is one of the most internationally influential and versatile Finnish translation scholars and known for her open-minded research. She also inspires new generations of researchers and has been deeply involved in organising international research training networks,” says Esa Penttilä, Chair of the Educators’ and Researchers’ Section of the Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters.
The ‘Tiedon helmi’ prize includes a steel artwork designed by Helle Damkjaer, which the winner may keep until the next winner is announced, and a certificate of honour.
The prize was awarded in the XVIII Symposium on Translation and Interpretation Studies in May. The theme this year was ‘Highlighting the quality of translation and interpreting’.
