![Ayed Alhajri](https://profiles-cardiff.imgix.net/attachments/444?w=200&h=200&auto=format&crop=faces&fit=crop&q=90")
Overview
After obtaining my BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Bisha with a high GPA in 2016, I took up a post as a teaching assistant job offer at Najran University in the Department of Languages and Translation. A few months later, I was granted a scholarship to pursue my higher education in Translation Studies.
I commenced an MA in Arabic/English Translation at the University of Leeds, which I completed successfully in 2018. I then moved back to Najran University where I taught a variety of courses in Translation and English Language for the academic year of 2018/2019. These included: Literary Translation, Theories of Translation, Legal Translation, and Technical Translation. In January 2020, I started my PhD at Cardiff University.
My PhD research focuses on different Arabic translations of the widely recognized fictional work Game of Thrones. My thesis evaluates whether these translations are adaptations, imitations, or rewritings of Game of Thrones in the Arabic-speaking world. It also analyses the formative forces that shape each of these translations and their reception by the Arabic audience. Moreover, it draws on a variety of theoretical prescriptive from the sphere of Translation Theory, most notably the word of Andre Lefevere and Lawrence Venuti.
Research
I am interested in a wide range of topics in the area of Translation Studies including, but not limited to, cultural translation, literary translation, translation teaching, machine translation, and computer-assisted translation. I have written and taught a range of pieces/classes related to these topics in the course of my career to date.
My MA thesis was on the topic of The Translating of the Culture-Specific Items of the novel The Song of Ice and Fire. Using Newmark's proposed translation procedures of translating CSI(Culture-Specific-Items), I examined how the CSIs were tackled in the Arabic translation of the ASOIAF (A Song of Ice and Fire) novel. I also designed a model using both Newmark's CSIs translating procedures (1988) and Venuti's two terms of domestication and foreignization (2008) to determine whether the CSIs in the Arabic translation of the novel had been domesticated or foreignized for the Arabic audience.
My teaching and research also draw on Adaptation studies and I am specifically interested in the interstice between translation studies and adaption studies. Although both translation and adaptation are two pieces of the same puzzle, some keep dividing them as two separated disciplines and that is how and where my PhD thesis topic was triggered.