The advancement of machine translation technology and AI has significantly impacted the field of subtitling. Subtitlers are no longer solely responsible for translating and timing subtitle blocks. Instead, they now collaborate with technology to ensure the quality and effectiveness of machine-generated subtitles. In this talk, I will share my professional practice as an English-Chinese subtitler and translation quality checker at SBS Australia, a public service broadcaster that provides multilingual and multicultural radio and television services. Drawing on my personal experiences, I will discuss the practical applications of technology to the subtitling process, including its use in correctly identifying timeframes and efficiency. I will also share some challenges in subtitling, arising both from the nature of subtitling and the use of technology, such as the need for cultural and contextual awareness. This talk aims to provide translation students interested in the profession with a better understanding of the industry and its practices.
 

Speaker 
Ms. Alisa Tian
Alisa Tian is an Associate Lecturer of Translation and Interpreting and a PhD candidate in translation pedagogy at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Australia. She is also a subtitler and translation quality checker at the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Australia. She has been an active translation/interpreting practitioner and educator since 2009, specialising in news translation, legal translation/interpreting and subtitling. Her recent works include a book translation of Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is and What It Should Be (「齒輪與怪物: 經濟學的今天與明天」), the documentary The History of China (「中國通史」) and the leading TV program on debate and personal stories in Australia Insight. Her recent research interests focus on translation pedagogy and systemic functional linguistics, aiming to bridge the gap between translation theory and practice in the classroom.

Speaker 
Prof. Niels GAUL
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
University of Edinburgh

My paper analyses the ways in which classicising learning and empire became more and more structurally, even symbiotically intertwined during what may for present purposes be dubbed the ‘long eleventh century’ (c.959–c.1127). In the year 959, the deaths of the Later Zhou emperor, Chai Rong (Shizong, r. 954–9), and Emperor Konstantinos VII Porphyrogennetos (r. 913/45–59) coincided and provide a convenient starting point for this chapter – in China, this paved the way for the Song imperial project; in Byzantium, imperial consolidation accelerated during the later decades of the tenth century – while toward the end of the period under consideration, both empires suffered catastrophic failure with the Jurchen Jin conquest of Kaifeng in 1127 and the Crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204. At the turn of the eleventh century emperors in Kaifeng and Constantinople presided over developments and faced challenges of a surprisingly similar nature: containing the military (aristocracy) while fighting off challenges from the steppe belt first and foremost among them. My focus is on Byzantium, with comparative glances at China: the better evidence on the Chinese side occasionally allows and encourages us to explore the arguably analogous processes in Byzantium in a new light.

I would like to outline three aspects in particular: First, I briefly explore the already well-established fact that classicising learning became one primary means of linking local provincial and suburban metropolitan elites to the imperial centre and was thus purposely fostered by emperors seeking to increase their hold on power. In the second step I examine how the influx of ‘new men’ allowed the courts in Kaifeng and Constantinople to raise the bar ever higher by introducing an expanding and increasingly complex examination systems that offered high rewards to the highest achievers and thus motivated the rest to invest into this system. In the third step I hope to show that as a result, emperors and courts had to dedicate more and more time themselves to participating in performances of classicising learning while literati actively sought to extend their influence over emperors: classicising learning evolved into a value system that united both emperors and literati. By means of conclusion I share some thoughts on why in spite of the obvious analogies, classicizing learning failed to become as deeply rooted in Byzantium as it did in Song and later imperial China.

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

Organized by the Department of Philosophy
with support from the Faculty of Arts
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
In celebration of the CUHK 60th Anniversary

Joining the conference on Zoom (no registration required) :
Meeting ID: 944 1856 7676

In a society in which very few were literate, how can historians capture the perspective of the non-literate masses? One revelatory approach is to explore how their contemporaries attempted to use all the human senses to communicate: the built environment offers abundant evidence to aid the historian in this quest. Drawing upon my own research on the European Middle Ages, this talk offers an introduction to the use of archeological, architectural, and artistic sources to write a more socially inclusive history of the exercise of power. Palaces and plazas in the urban centers of medieval Italy, I argue, communicated a highly differentiated set of claims to authority through materials, style, and the manipulation of space.

Speaker 
Prof. Maureen MILLER
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Speaker 
Dr. Anna LEE
The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, The Hebrew University

Anna Jungeun Lee is a cultural historian of consumption and material life in developing South Korea. Her book manuscript, Kaleidoscopic Korea: Transnational Consumption in Developing Modern Korea, paints the irony of foreign and luxury material culture thriving under an authoritarian government.

Dr. Lee completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University, her M.A. at New York University, and holds a B.A. from Yonsei University in South Korea.
Before coming to Hebrew University, she was the Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Her recent publications appeared in Acta Koreana (June 2022) and the Journal of Korean Studies (October 2022).

Abstract
The analytic philosophy of language is built around the idea that a speaker’s fundamental goal is to encode some information, a listener’s goal is to recover it, and a theory of language is successful if it can explain the exchange. Despite many successes, this conception obscures a point that is a central focus of research on language in other disciplines: how we speak is often at least as important as what we say.

My aim in this paper will be to show how deep this platitude goes. First, I will argue that the best way to understand the style of our speech is to see it as a tool we use not to send messages, but to perform actions. Making sense of these actions, however, requires viewing one other as agents motivated by moral, aesthetic, and social reasons than are not ordinarily countenanced in the philosophy of language. Drawing on some comparisons with Confucian philosophy, I will argue that these reasons end up permeating nearly any conversation we have, which means that deep moral questions are ever present.

Speaker 
Prof. Ethan Paul Nowak
Visiting Scholar, Department of Philosophy, CUHK
Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Philosophy, Umeå University, Sweden

Joining the Seminar face-to-face:
Limited seats for face-to-face seminar. Registrations will be handled on a first come, first served basis.
Register by 29 Mar: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13664957

Joining the Seminar online:
No registration is required.
Link to Meeting: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92004912463
Meeting ID: 920 0491 2463

Dean of Arts, Professor Max Xiaobing Tang delivered a warm welcome speech to especially thank Professor David Faure, Emeritus Professor of the Department of History for being the ceremony’s Guest of Honour. Dean Tang sent his warmest congratulations to the 21 award-winning teachers for their contributions to inspiring students. Professor Wendy Lee of the Department of Music gave a sharing on behalf of the award-winning teachers. Additionally, nearly 360 students from undergraduate and postgraduate programmes earned a coveted spot on the Dean's List for the 2021-2022 academic year. Peter Wang (UG Year 2) from the Department of Philosophy shared his love of wisdom and encouraged the peers to continue acquiring knowledge to be a better self and serve the community.

Heartfelt congratulations to all the award recipients and students who achieved academic excellence! We look forward to next year’s ceremony!

Recent studies in automatic readability assessment have shown that hybrid models --- models that leverage both linguistically motivated features and neural models --- can outperform neural models. However, most evaluations on hybrid models have been based on in-domain data in English. This paper provides further evidence on the contribution of linguistic features by reporting the first direct comparison between hybrid, neural and linguistic models on cross-domain data. In experiments on a Chinese dataset, the hybrid model outperforms the neural model on both in-domain and cross-domain data. Importantly, the hybrid model exhibits much smaller performance degradation in the cross-domain setting, suggesting that the linguistic features are more robust and can better capture salient indicators of text difficulty.
 

Speaker 
Professor John Sie Yuen LEE (City University of Hong Kong)
Dr Lee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Computer Science in 2009. Dr Lee's research focus is on natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, especially their applications in computer-assisted language learning. His recent projects include automatic readability assessment, reading material recommendation and exercise generation for language learning, and Cantonese chatbot development. His research projects have been supported by the Innovation and Technology Fund, Health and Medical Research Fund, General Research Fund, and Language Fund from the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research.

Cantonese opera has been the most representative Chinese opera genre in Hong Kong since 19th Century. Since 2009 when the genre has been enlisted into the Human Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, the Hong Kong government has been promoting Cantonese opera through various channels. Facing the development in the past decades, various issues have been raised.

This presentation will report some of my research projects on different issues related to transmission of Cantonese Opera. The first project is an investigation and documentation of apprenticeship and conservatory tradition as transmission modes. The second one is related to the development of personal style of Cantonese opera artists in Hong Kong. Furthermore, two project are about a) teaching Cantonese opera in schools with a partnership approach and b) a survey of Hong Kong and Guangdong schools in including Cantonese opera in school-based curriculum. If time allows, I will also talk about my recent projects on applying technology in enhancing the effectiveness of learning Cantonese opera in schools and community. I will conclude with an overall observation on the issues of transmission of Cantonese opera.
 

Speaker
Prof. Bo-Wah LEUNG
Leung Bo-Wah is Professor of the Department of Cultural and Creative Arts and Director of the Research Centre for Transmission of Cantonese Opera at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). He is the current President (2022–2024) of the International Society for Music Education (ISME), Chair of the Asia-Pacific Symposium for Music Education Research (APSMER), and Executive Forum Member of World Alliance for Arts Education (WAAE). He was invited to serve as Visiting Scholar by the School of Music, University of Washington, USA in 2018. Professor Leung was the Head of Department of Cultural and Creative Arts (2015–2021), and Associate Dean (Quality Assurance & Enhancement) of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (2015–2017) at the EdUHK.

In this talk, Prof. Wong will discuss his recent book on Uyghur music. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnographic and archival research, Even in the Rain: Uyghur Music in Modern China explores music as constitutive of Uyghur cultural and social life where subaltern experiences of ethnicity/race and nationhood are indexed. He looks at how Uyghur music has been minoritized under the pretexts of Chinese multiculturalism and cultural enlightenment during much of the last century and beyond. Local musicians and audiences, He suggests, adopt a vast range of performing and listening approaches as they engage assimilation, mass incarceration, and other grim realities of everyday life.

 

Speaker 
Prof. Chuen-Fung WONG
Chuen-Fung Wong studied music at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Chung Chi College, class of 1999). He is author of four books: Even in the Rain: Uyghur Music in Modern China (2023), Silk and Bamboo: Instrumental Chamber Music from the Chinese South (2023), Soundscapes in Chinese Music (2019), and Listening to Chinese Music (2009), as well as over two dozen essays published in journals, encyclopedias, and collected volumes. He teaches ethnomusicology and world music at Macalester College, where he is also the founding director of the Macalester Asian Music Ensemble.