Zixian

I’ve been studying the Masters for one and a half years and moved to Canberra from China, where ANU has a very high reputation, especially for its research.

When I first looked at the translation program, I saw that the course provided translation courses, language and culture courses and linguistics courses that are comprehensive and all fit well, which I think will benefit my studies. I compared the ANU program with other universities and found it was more suitable for me.

Among the highlights, Canberra is a quiet city which is really suitable for studying. It makes me calm and helps me focus on my studies.

The ANU lecturers and guest lecturers have widened my horizons, and they have left a deep impression on me through their rigorous scholarship and deep understanding of relevant subjects. Their backgrounds are different – some are from translation, some from semantics, some from morphology and syntax, while some are interested in linguistics and culture of different languages. All these backgrounds can give me new viewpoints to study translation.

The course categories are systematic. One of them involves different specialised languages. I’m going to choose Chinese, but you can also do other languages like French, German, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Indonesian or Spanish. I’d like to communicate with my classmates who speak different languages and share our translation experiences, to notice different cultural conflicts or linguistic differences and work out methods to solve them.

I’ve also enjoyed the methodology-related courses and will learn different methods for different fields, for example, linguistics and translation studies.

I’m still trying to transfer to the Master of Translation (Advanced) to figure out my master thesis. I’m not going to be a professional translator, but I’d like to do translation studies, for example, translation evaluation or literary and news translation.

I studied a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Applied Translation Studies in China. I plan to do further study and a PhD if possible, as I want to be a university lecturer. I like the feeling of studying knowledge about translation and linguistics. It’s fascinating and feels like I’m finding a new world.