Contact
Areas of expertise
Biography
Lauri A. Niskanen (Ph.D.) is a Senior researcher of English, Classics and Multilingual Translation Studies at the University of Turku, in the Narrative Text, Translator and Machine: In Search of User-Friendly Translation Technology for Literary Texts research project. In 2023 he was a Visiting Academic at the Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation, Trinity College Dublin. He conducted is doctoral doctoral research Hubbub of Phenomenon: The Polyphonic Translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the University of Helsinki, and earned his doctorate in 2021.
Teaching
At the University of Helsinki Niskanen has taught comparative literature text analysis courses since 2015, mostly poetry analysis and the history of English poetry. Outside the Academia, he has taught writing and reciting courses for all ages.
Research
Lauri A. Niskanen has studied the translation of a complex intertextual literary text, and the hermeneutic process which continues in the translations and retranslations of a literary work. He has created a digital OSH companion, which enables the tagging of lexical and syntactical markers in the hypertext of the source text. These markers are references to hypotexts, which are imitated or parodied in the work examined. The method can be elaborated by comparing these referential relationships (‘tags’) to those present in translated texts. In the Narrative Text, Translator and Machine: In Search of User-Friendly Translation Technology for Literary Texts research project, Niskanen is examining how the OSH hypertext tags, or referential signals, can be automated, coded, and used in the prototype of a machine-assisted literary translation application, and how they could be used to recognise intertextual references and connect allusions to their correct context.