Lettie Dorst is an associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She teaches a range of different courses in the Minor Translation and the MA Translation, including courses on Translation Studies, Translation Technology, Multimodal Translation and Subtitling. Her research focuses on metaphor variation, metaphor translation, literary machine translation, and machine translation literacy. She recently led an NRO Comenius Senior Fellow project on "The Value of Machine Translation for the Multilingual Academic Community". She was also the lead linguist on the ZonMW project "Dementia in Metaphors".

More information about Lettie Dorst

Fields of interest

• Translation Studies
• Descriptive Translation Studies
• Multimodal Translation
• Audiovisual Translation
• Literary Translation
• Machine Translation
• Metaphor Studies
• Genre Analysis
• Corpus Linguistics
• Stylistics
• Multilingualism
• Reception Studies

Research

Lettie Dorst successfully defended her PhD thesis on "Metaphor in Fiction: Language, Thought and Communication" in June 2011. Since then she has done research on the use and translation of metaphor, style and gender in different genres and domains, including literature, journalism, religious discourse and health communication. Her current research focus is on machine translation and multilingualism in academia on the one hand, and on metaphor and intercultural communication on the other.

Grants and awards

• 2024: EAMT grant for a pilot project on "Metaphor in Literary Machine Translation and Post-Editing"
• 2024: DH Small Grant for a pilot project on "Reading Metaphor in Literary Machine Translation and Post-Editing"
• 2024: FGW onderwijsinnovatieproject "Practice makes Progress: instructievideo's en oefenmaterialen voor beginnend ondertitelaars Engels – Nederlands"
• 2020-2023: NRO Comenius Senior Fellow on "The Value of Machine Translation in the Multilingual Academic Community"
• 2019-2023: member of NWO ZonMW Memorabel project "Dementia in Metaphors: Towards Shared Understanding and Decision-making in Families of Various Cultural Backgrounds"

Key publications 

• Dorst, A.G. (2023). Metaphor in literary machine translation: style, creativity and literariness. In: Rothwell, A., Way, A., & Youdale, R. (Eds.) (2023), Computer-Assisted Literary Translation, chapter 8. London: Routlegde.
• Zeven, K., & Dorst, A.G. (2021). A beautiful little fool? Retranslating Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, Perspectives 29(5), 661-675. 
• Dorst, A.G. (2019). Translating metaphorical mind style: machinery and ice metaphors in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perspectives 27(6), 875-889. 
• Anke J.M. Oerlemans, Aletta G. Dorst, Marjan L. Knippenberg, Gert J. Olthuis, Dementia in metaphors: A qualitative study among informal caregivers of people with dementia from migrant and ethnic minority groups, SSM - Qualitative Research in Health, Volume 3, 2023.
• Dorst, A.G., Valdez, S., & Bouman, H. (2022). Machine translation in the multilingual classroom: How, when and why do humanities students at a Dutch university use machine translation? Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 8(1), 49 – 66. 

Publications

Activities