The University of Ottawa Library is pleased to recognize Professor Lynne Bowker as the recipient of the 2023 Open Scholarship Award.
Dr. Bowker is a Full Professor in Translation and Interpretation, focusing on machine translation literacy. Dr. Bowker makes a substantial contribution to advancing open scholarship, both in her teaching and research, and focuses on making her work more accessible to non-academic audiences, and available and translated in languages other than English. Dr. Bowker has published numerous open educational resources (OER) and open access books. When asked why she created an OER, Dr. Bowker replied:
“Students in my courses are preparing for careers as professional translators, but the majority of educational materials deal with American or British English and European French.”
Lynne Bowker
“Students in Canadian translation programs rarely see themselves reflected in teaching materials. (…) I created a bilingual Open Educational Resources (OER) focusing on Canadian English and Canadian French. Now translation students across Canada can be what they see: language professionals who specialize in serving the Canadian market. (…) Representation matters, and OER can facilitate it”.
Here, Dr. Bowker is referring to Translating for Canada, eh?, published in 2021. She has also published the OER Using Game-based Learning Online(2020) and De-mystifying Translation (2023), which has already been downloaded over 70,000 times around the globe!
Dr. Bowker’s diverse approach to practicing and promoting open research also includes sitting on the advisory board for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons (HSS Commons), a collaborator on the European Union-funded project DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication). In addition, it encompasses her continued work participating in showcases and webinars (e.g. Open Library Creator Spotlight 2020, Fabrique RÉL 2022, eCampus Ontario 2023).
Congratulations to Lynne Bowker!
To learn more about Dr. Bowker’s work, please visit the larger Machine Translation Literacy project, all openly available material with a Creative Commons license, and stay tuned for her future work on a new bilingual (EN/FR) OER, provisionally titled “Garbage in, garbage out! Get better translations by writing better texts / « Médiocre à l’entrée = médiocre à la sortie ! Optimisez vos traductions en optimisant vos textes de départ », set for release in Spring 2024!