Dr. Sonia Colina is Regents Professor and Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, where she teaches linguistics and translation studies. She is also the curriculum designer and coordinator for the UA’s Online Translation Certificate (originally funded through an Arizona Board of Regents grant). Previously, Dr. Colina was Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Translation Certificate Program at Arizona State University. She also taught translation at Indiana University and at the University of Illinois.
Dr. Colina is the author of Fundamentals of Translation (Cambridge UP, 2015), Translation Teaching: from Research to the Classroom (McGraw-Hill, 2003), the co-editor of T&I Pedagogy in Dialogue with Other Disciplines (with C. Angelelli, 2017) and of numerous articles in edited volumes and prestigious journals such as Target, The Translator, Babel, Linguistics and Lingua. Her research areas are pedagogy of translation, translator education, translation quality evaluation, and applied linguistics and translation, in particular, the connections between translation, language teaching and second language acquisition. She is on the editorial board of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) and on the International Advisory Board of the Translator and Interpreter Trainer.
Professor Colina has also worked as an expert consultant in translation for the University of Arizona’s National Center on Interpretation Research and Policy (where she was involved in the design of the translation curriculum for the Major and Minor in Translation and Interpretation) and as a translation scholar and expert advisor for the Hablamos Juntos project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. From 2014-2018 she was a researcher in the NIH-funded project Oyendo Bien (Hearing Well) that uses the Community Health Worker model to improve access to care by LEP populations with chronic hearing loss on the Arizona-Mexico border. She was responsible for the translation/language mediation aspect of the grant. She is also a Co-Investigator on another NIH grant with the UA’s Department of Management of Information Systems on Spanish/English automatic text simplification and was the PI in Confluencenter Faculty Collaboration grant (2016-2017).
In addition to her academic and scholarly work, Sonia Colina has created and presented a variety of workshops for professional translators, managers of translators, and teachers of translation. She has in-house and free-lance translation experience and co-owned a small translation company.
Sonia Colina received her PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and is a SUNY-Binghamton alumna (MA, Translation Studies).
She is a founding member and past President of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA) (www.atisa.org).