Research Topic 1: International medical translation and interpreting studies

  The International Medical Translation Program at Fu Jen University was established in 2014, and it was promoted to become a Master's level program in 2015. Based on the project of "International Medical Translation and Interpreting Curriculum Design and Practical Operation" launched in 2017, Professor Yang collected and sorted Chinese, English and Japanese data such as medical terminology, medical textbooks, hospital multilingual public signs, medical texts, and students' internship reports. She has also constructed a multilingual corpus by using those data. Achievements have been made every year in the training of international medical translation and interpreting talent, curriculum design, language service provision for medical fields, and the building of inter-disciplinary knowledge platforms and research team. Professor Yang has also taken the initiative to participate in the establishment of the ISO standard on medical interpreting service. She has built a cross-disciplinary research team with doctors from Taiwan and China, as well as doctoral students from Taiwan, China, and Japan.

  Future studies will focus on, but will not be limited to, the training of medical language service talent, research on the combination of medical language service and artificial intelligence (AI), research-study combination in international language service, and specialized translator and interpreter education under the guidance of sociological theory.

Research Topic 2: Translators and Translation Activities during Japanese Rule in Taiwan

  Since 2011, Professor Yang has proposed and finished a series of studies on translation history and translators and interpreters during the period of Japanese rule in Taiwan. A total of 13 papers (11 in Chinese, one in English and one in Japanese) have been published, totaling 260,000 words.

In terms of the themes of these studies, Professor Yang has examined the group of Japanese court interpreters who have never been attached importance to in Taiwanese history. Furthermore, she adopted a corpus-based approach to study the Japanese and Taiwanese interpreters' exams, and explained the corresponding relationship between the colonizers and colonized people through the corpus and historical materials in Japanese and Taiwanese. Aiming at the multi-level linguistic features and the translation activities and group attributes of bilingual colonial intermediaries, Professor Yang explores the "nuanced history" shaped by political power, value orientation, cultural inheritance, and historical writing. In 2016, Translators and Translation Activities during the Period of Japanese Rule in Taiwan: The Complex Intersections between Colonialism, Language and Cultures edited by Professor Yang was published by National Taiwan University Press, and has become an essential monograph in this research field.

Future studies will continue to explore Taiwanese translators and interpreters and their translation activities during the period of Japanese rule in Taiwan, as well as the related cross-cultural issues.

  Professor Yang has served as a Chinese-Japanese conference interpreter at about 1000 conferences starting from 1988. She has participated in National Science Council / Ministry of Science and Technology projects every year from 1988 to 2018, and has produced approximately 30 research papers in the last five years. She is currently promoting the International Medical Translation Program at Fu Jen Catholic University, which started in September 2014. On October 31, 2015, she was part of the establishment of the International Medical Translators and Interpreters Association and served as the Deputy Director of the association from 2015 to 2017. In January 2018, Professor Yang was elected as the second Director of the Association.