Biography
James Hadley studied a dual degree of Japanese and computing as his undergraduate. He then went on to study a master's degree in Buddhist Studies before moving on to a second master's degree in translation studies. In 2013, he completed his PhD in translation studies with a thesis challenging the hegemony of a small number of translation theories and cultural contexts in translation studies research outputs. After completing his PhD, James moved to China, where he taught and continued researching translation studies. He then became the translation studies researcher for the University of London's School of Advanced Study before moving to Dublin to take up his current post.
Publications and Further Research Outputs
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Paul F. Bandia, James Hadley, Siobhán McElduff, Translation Classics in Context, London; New York, Routledge, 2024
Paul Bandia, James Hadley, Siobhán McElduff, Translation and the Classic, London; New York, Routledge, 2024
MT and CAT: Challenges, irrelevancies, or opportunities for literary translation? in, 2023, pp91 - 105, pp91-105 , [Hadley J.L.]
James Hadley, Systematically Analysing Indirect Translations: Putting The Concatenation Effect Hypothesis to the Test, London; New York, Routledge, 2023
Translation Spaces, (2023), Hanna Pięta, James Hadley, Jan Buts, Laura Ivaska, [eds.]
Buts J., Pieta H., Ivaska L., Hadley J., Indirect translation and sustainable development, Translation Spaces(Netherland), 12, (2), 2023, p167 - 176, p167-176
James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, Translation Technologies for Creative-Text Translation, London; New York, Routledge, 2022
QuantiQual: Quantifying the Qualities of Indirect Translations in, editor(s)Bruno Berni, Catia De Marco, Anna Wegener , Passaggi intermedi: La traduzione indiretta in Italia, Rome, Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, 2022, [James Luke Hadley]
James Hadley, Nell Regan, A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2021
Hadley J., The concatenation effect hypothesis in complex indirect translations: translating the Arabian Nights into Gaelic and Japanese, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 29, (5), 2021, p676 - 690, p676-690
Alberto Poncelas, Wichaya Pidchamook, Chao-Hong Liu, James Hadley, Andy Way, Multiple Segmentations of Thai Sentences for Neural Machine Translation, Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages and CCURL Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages Workshop, 2020
Dominic Glynn & James Hadley, Theorising (un)performability and (un)translatability, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 2020
Alberto Poncelas, Mohammad Aboomar, Jan Buts, James Hadley, Andy Way, A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents, Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, 2020
James Hadley, Maria Popović, Haithem Afli, Andy Way(ed.), Qualities of Literary Machine Translation, Dublin Machine Translation Summit, Dublin, August 2019, European Association for Machine Translation, 2019
Rhetoric, oratory, interpreting and translation in, editor(s)Kirsten Malmkjær , The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics, London and New York, Routledge, 2018, pp121 - 132, [James Luke Hadley and Siobhán McElduff]
James Hadley, The beginnings of literary translation in Japan: an overview, Perspectives, 2018, p1--16
James Hadley, The Beginnings of Literary Translation In Japan: An Overview, Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2018
James Hadley, Indirect translation and discursive identity: Proposing the concatenation effect hypothesis, Translation Studies, 10, (2), 2017, p183 - 197
James Hadley, Shifts in Patronage Differentiation: Translations from European Languages in isolationist Japan, Meta, 2016
Hadley, J., Akashi, M., Translation and celebrity: The translation strategies of Haruki Murakami and their implications for the visibility paradigm, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 23, (3), 2015, p458-474
James Hadley, Motoko Akashi, 著名翻訳家・テクスト分析・可視性概念 : 村上春樹にみる同化・異化論の進展, 通訳翻訳研究, 14, 2014, p183 - 201
Hadley, J., Chaucer abducted: Examining the conception of translation behind the Canterbury Tales, New Voices in Translation Studies, 11, (1), 2014, p1-24
Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications
James Hadley, Roy Youdale. Using Computers in the Translation of Literary Style: Challenges and Opportunities., Machine Translation, 2020
Alberto Poncelas, Pintu Lohar, Andy Way, James Hadley, The impact of indirect machine translation on sentiment classification, arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.11257, 2020
James Hadley, Beverley Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, and Kikuno Tanabe, Multiple translation communities in contemporary Japan, The Translator , 2016, p386 - 389
James Hadley, Translation in modern Japan, Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2015
James Hadley, Translation in anthologies and collections (19th and 20th centuries), Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2015
James Hadley, Translation theory and development studies: a complexity theory approach, 2014
James Hadley, Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source, Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice , 2014
Research Expertise
Description
James' research has had a formative effect over several emerging aspects of translation studies. His work focuses predominantly on literary translation, and especially on phenomena which have historically been under-researched. James' work stands out in the field for his use of digital humanities methods to increase academic rigour, along with his use of the scientific method in a subject area which has historically been characterised by subjectivity. He began by correlating the publications of translations of European works in Japanese against world events, identifying possible impacts each had on the other. His work then shifted on to focus on indirect translation, the very widespread phenomenon of translating works which are themselves translations. Indirect translation has only recently attracted sustained scholarly attention. James wrote a book and several articles proposing new hypotheses and demonstrating new methods for analysing and comparing indirect translations with one another and with direct translations. Some of these texts have since become foundational to this sub-field. More recently, James' expertise in the interplay of literary translation and computing have made his work highly sought-after in the context of the new sub-field called Computer-Assisted Literary Translation (CALT). Having organised events, co-edited books, collaborated widely on research projects, and authored and co-authored journal articles on this rapidly developing but still poorly understood sub-field, James' voice has come to be sought after in bringing clarity to questions related to the use of technology in literary translation. Since the widespread emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, this subject has become fertile ground for wild speculation, based on a generally poor understanding of the mechanics, limitations and most efficient ways of using these tools. James' ability to test and explain the implications of tool use for practice, theory and industry are, therefore, valued by scholars and practitioners, alike.Projects
- Title
- QuantiQual: Quantifying the Qualities of Indirect Translations
- Summary
- The aim of this project is to ask how the qualities of indirect translations can be described and acted on in such a way as to maximise their value for readers. Indirect translations occur when the resources required to translate a text directly from language A to language C are not available. Therefore, the translator first translates the source text into language B, and from this pivot language, translates the text to language C. Both human and machine translators make use of this technique for similar reasons. However, in both cases, indirect translation is seen as a less than desirable work-around, and therefore, has not been a priority when considering the qualities of the final outputs. This project will find ways to describe and ultimately control the qualities of indirect translations. It will use the term "qualities" in the plural in order to acknowledge that translations are produced for many different reasons, for a range of different intended purposes, and that these factors affect the perception of a translation's fitness for purpose. The project will run corpus-based experiments on indirect translations produced by humans, comparing the source texts (A), direct translations (B), and target text (C) with one another and also with a large number of texts in their respective languages to ask how much each confirms to the linguistic norms of its own context. The project will then test machine-produced translations of the same texts into the same languages using the same methodology. The hypothesis is that indirect translations tend to lose cultural markers specific to the source language, and that the language of indirect translations tends to be highly normalised to the target language. The aim is to test this hypothesis, and ultimately to find methods for controlling these qualities in texts translated by humans and machines alike.
- Funding Agency
- IRC
- Date From
- 2019
- Date To
- 2021
- Title
- Terry Pratchett Research Group
- Summary
- I am one of the founding members of the Terry Pratchett Research Group. This group is a team of individuals drawn from across the college, all of whom have research interests that draw on or are linked to author Terry Pratchett's life and work. It includes researchers working in Children's Literature, Digital Humanities, and, of course, Literary Translation. Trinity College Library has one of the most complete collections of Terry Pratchett's work in the world, and the main aim of the research group is to make this collection as accessible as possible to promote creative, groundbreaking research outputs. This project has recently been generously awarded seed funding by Trinity Long Room Hub's Research Incentive Scheme for 2018-19.
- Funding Agency
- Trinity Long Room Hub
- Date From
- 2018
- Date To
- 2019
Recognition
Representations
I worked in the capacity of a consultant for the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and the Institute of Modern Languages Research, two institutes of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in the creation of a new Master's Degree in Legal Translation Studies
I sit of the steering committee of the Petra-e framework, a group of universities from across Europe that all teach and/or research Literary Translation Studies
I was part of the organising committee of the Translation Studies Network of Ireland Conference 2019
Awards and Honours
IRC COALESCE Research Fund
Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme
早稲田大学：国際共同研究推進・招聘費補助制度 [Waseda University: Advanced International Research Collaboration Assistance Grants]
Private Research Funding from Estate of Terry Pratchett
Private Research Funding from John Gillespie
M.A. (Dubl.) jure officii
早稲田大学：国際共同研究推進・招聘費補助制度 [Waseda University: Advanced International Research Collaboration Assistance Grants]
Memberships
Irish Humanities Alliance board member
Editorial Board of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (journal)
Board Member of Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation
Steering group member of PETRA-e framework
Steering group member of TSNI group (Translation Studies Network Ireland)
Active member of IndirecTrans, the world's leading research network for scholars of Indirect Translation