Wine Tesseur

Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Modern Languages, University of Reading
My primary research interest is in language and translation policy at NGOs. I work as a postdoctoral research assistant on the AHRC-project "The Listening Zones of NGOs: languages and cultural knowledge in development programmes", led by Professor Hilary Footitt. The project is led by Reading University with the University of Portsmouth and the International NGO training and Research Centre (INTRAC), Oxford.

My doctoral research dealt with translation policies at the human rights NGO Amnesty International. I investigated how translation at Amnesty International is organised, what kind of policies different Amnesty offices have in place, and how this is reflected in the translation products. My research also pursued how translation and translation policy impact on an organisation's message and voice as it is spread around the world.

My doctoral research was carried out in my position as a Marie Curie Early Career Research Fellow in the FP7 Initial Training Network "TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe". As part of TIME, I completed several work placements at Amnesty International, i.e. at Amnesty's Language Resource Centre in Madrid and Paris, and at Amnesty Flanders, Antwerp. I collected data for my research and helped out at the Amnesty offices with their translation projects.

My doctoral research was quite interdisciplinary and apart from its focus on translation, I also drew on organisation theory, journalism studies, linguistic ethnography, sociology, and research on NGOs from political science and international relations. I continue to broaden my research horizons as part of the Listening Zones project. This particularly involves an interest in development work, anthropology, and cultural studies.

I am an active member of the Institute of Translation & Interpreting (ITI) and occasionally translate on a freelance and voluntary basis (e.g. for the online bloggers platform Global Voices). I also maintain strong links with the Centre for Translation Studies (CETRA) and with the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven campus Antwerp (previously Lessius University College), where I worked as an editorial assistant on the Translation Studies Bibliography and on the Handbook of Translation Studies prior to starting my doctoral research.