主題講者

(只提供英文版本)

Douglas ROBINSON is an American academic scholar, translator and fiction-writer who is best known for his work in translation studies, but has published widely on various aspects of human communication and social interaction (American literature, literary theory, linguistic theory, gender theory, writing theory, rhetorical theory). He has translated several Finnish novels, plays, and monographs into English, and his own novel was written in English but first published in Finnish translation. Robinson is currently Professor of Translating and Interpreting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Emeritus Professor of Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Robinson obtained his PhD from the University of Washington in 1983, with a dissertation entitled American Apocalypses directed by Leroy Searle. In 1989 Robinson accepted a job as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where he worked for the next 21 years, the last three as Director of First-Year Writing. During that time, he also spent one semester (spring 1999) as Acting Director of the MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa, one semester (1999–2000) as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Vic, Catalonia, and one year (2005–2006) as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Voronezh State University, Russia.

In 2010 Robinson was appointed Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of English and Head of the English Department at Lingnan University, and in 2012 as Chair Professor of English and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. He stepped down from the Deanship at the end of his first three-year term, August 31, 2015, but continued as Chair Professor of English until August 31, 2020, when he became Professor of Translating and Interpreting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Emeritus Professor of Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies at HKBU.

While Robinson's influence on the field of translation studies in particular is global, his work has been especially enthusiastically received in China. Lin Zhu's book on his work, The Translator-Centered Multidisciplinary Construction, was originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Nankai University, in Tianjin, PRC; and as Robinson himself notes in his foreword to that book, Chinese responses to his work almost always seem to display a complex appreciation of the middle ground he explores between thinking and feeling—whereas there is a tendency in the West to binarize the two, so that any talk of feeling gets read as implying a complete exclusion of both analytical thought and collective social regulation. In her book Dr. Zhu responds extensively to this Chinese reception of Robinson's thought, noting problems of emphasis and focus, identifying nuance errors in both Chinese translations and paraphrases of his work; but, perhaps because of the "ecological" tendencies of ancient Chinese thought in the Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions, and the focus in Confucius and Mencius on feeling as the root of all human ethical growth, Chinese scholars typically lack the inclination often found in Western scholars to relegate feeling to pure random idiosyncratic body states.