MUPLA: Media use of pharmaceutical promotional literature: the case of antidepressant medication

Biography

I studied English Language and Literature for undergraduate degree and Applied Linguistics for MA at Henan Normal University in China, and obtained MPhil and PhD in Corpus Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, UK. My main research interests are in Corpus Linguistics, Translation Studies (Chinese-English/English-Chinese), Discourse Analysis, Second Language Teaching and Learning, Complexity Theory. I joined the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey in 2017, after having taught at the University of Essex, University of Birmingham and Henan Normal University in China. I am the program director of MA Interpreting, Technology and AI (Chinese Pathway) and program director of MA Translation and AI (Chinese Pathway) at the Centre for Translation Studies. 

I am the principle investigator of a research project funded by British Academy (2022-2024). The project investigates how pharmaceutical promotional texts, newspaper articles and medical journal articles represent the most commonly prescribed antidepressants in Britain and China by making use of large-scale datasets. It aims to find out how British and Chinese people have understood the treatment of depression in different ways based on the media representations to which they are exposed. Such findings will inform the inter-professional education and training of translators and interpreters working in mental healthcare settings. Upon the completion of the project, a 10-million-word English-Chinese comparable corpus on antidepressants has been built, which is also used by Chinese MA students at the Centre for Translation Studies to practise corpus-assisted medical translation and interpreting.

I am also a member of another recently completed European Mental Health for All (MHealth4All, 2022–25, Work Package leader: Sabine Braun) project which has developed a digital platform offering reliable, evidence-based information about depression and its treatment.

I was recently granted the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Accelerating Account (ESRC IAA, 2025-2026) funding to explore the social impacts of the research findings generated from my BA project and the MHealth4All project. We will take such findings out to audiences beyond academia, ensuring that our research contributes meaningfully to real-world improvements in mental health understanding and care. 

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Biography

I am a Professor of Translation Studies, Director of the Centre for Translation Studies, and a Co-Director of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey in the UK. From 2017 to 2021 I also served as Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Surrey.

My research explores the integration and interaction of human and machine in translation and interpreting, for example to improve access to critical information, media content and vital public services such as healthcare and justice for linguistic-minority populations and other groups/people in need of communication support. My overarching interest lies in the notions of fairness, trust, transparency, and quality in relation to technology use in these contexts.

For over 10 years, I have led a programme of research that has involved cross-disciplinary collaboration with academic and non-academic partners to improve access to justice for linguistically diverse populations. Under this programme, I have investigated the use of video links in legal proceedings involving linguistic-minority participants and interpreters from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. I have led several multi-national research projects in this field (AVIDICUS 1-3, 2008-16) while contributing my expertise in video interpreting to other projects in the justice sector (e.g. QUALITAS, 2012-14, Understanding Justice, 2013-16, VEJ Evaluation, 2018-20). I have advised the European Council Working Party on e-Law (e-Justice) and other justice-sector institutions in the UK and internationally on video interpreting in legal proceedings and have developed guidelines which have been reflected in European Council Recommendation 2015/C 250/01 on ‘Promoting the use of and sharing of best practices on cross-border videoconferencing’.

In other projects I have explored the use of videoconferencing and virtual reality to train users of interpreting services in how to communicate effectively through an interpreter IVY, 2011-3; EVIVA, 2014-15, SHIFT, 2015-18).

A further example of my work on accessibility is my research on audio description (video description) for visually impaired people. In the H2020 project MeMAD (2018-21) I have recently investigated the feasibility of (semi-)automating AD to improve access to media content that is not normally covered by human AD (e.g. social media content).

In 2019, the Research Centre I lead was awarded an ‘Expanding Excellence in England (E3)' grant (2019-24) by Research England to expand our research on human-machine integration in translation and interpreting. As part of this, I am currently leading and involved in a number of pilot studies aimed at better human-machine integration in different modalities of translation and interpreting.

The insights from my research have informed my teaching in interpreting and audiovisual translation on CTS’s MA programmes and the professional training courses that I have delivered (e.g. for the Metropolitan Police Service in London).

From 2018-2021 I was a member of the DIN Working Group on Interpreting Services and Technologies and co-authored the first standard on remote consecutive interpreting worldwide (DIN 8578). I am a member of the BSI Sub-committee Terminology. From 2018-2022, I was the series editor of the IATIS Yearbook (Routledge) and am currently associate series editor for interpreting of Elements in Translation and Interpreting (CUP) and a member of the Advisory Board of Interpreting (Benjamins). I was appointed to the sub-panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics for the Research Excellence Framework REF 2021.

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