TRSS (Translation Research Summer School)

It costs a few hundred pounds. I had to drag myself out of bed every morning and made my way to UCL (By the end of the week I was wondering how on earth did I survive 6 years teaching in a Singapore school).   It took up 2 weeks of my summer holidays when I can be travelling or working on my dissertation. But this Summer School is probably going to be the highlight of my year in London.

First of all, I get to meet Mona Baker and Theo Hermans. No, they are not rock musicians, but the translation studies academic circle is so small that you basically know almost all of them. Not forgetting to mention Hephzibah Israel and Kathryn Batchelor, who I have never heard of before this program, but they blow my mind away all the same. The ease with which they explain and present sophisticated ideas and theories is so awe-inspiring.

And of course you get to meet fellow translation researchers from all over the world - Finland, Argentina, Mexico, Libya, Nigeria, Ukraine (of course there are more, but these are the more exotic ones haha). When you belong to a particular institution and you only talk to fellow classmates who all attend the same classes from the same few lecturers, sooner or later your perspectives become limited. This is where this summer school helped tremendously, listening to all the different issues which people from various language pairs and research interests are dabbling in. I certainly got a few inspirations for my dissertation and also my PhD research proposal, and I regret to say that they have provided my impetus and suggestion than my supervisor  (who is MIA and nobody knows what happened to him) ever did.

I have fewer than three months in London now, and out of which I will spend one month or even more travelling. There are so many places to visit and things to do, stuff which I have put off indefinitely, telling myself that I am living in London for one whole year and there was no rush. Clearly I cannot afford to do all of these things now and I need to be more selective. And I have not typed a single word for my 20,000 word dissertation, although I do have a drawer full of research articles and readings at various states of completion.

Flying off to Scandinavia in three days time! Wanderlust which I cannot restrain.