Susana Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. With a PhD in medical translation, her research intersects machine translation, AI, health communication, and migration. Her main research focus is on how migrants overcome language barriers in healthcare settings. Fueled by her work in the translation industry, she also researches audiovisual indirect translation, focusing on ethics and sustainability. She has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in highly-regarded journals such as Target, The Translator, Translation Spaces and The Journal of Specialised Translation, as well as co-edited special issues. Her work has been nominated for awards such as the YERUN Open Science and the 2022 EST Young Scholar Prize.

More information about S. Valdez

Research

Susana Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. She researches interlingual and intercultural communication of medical content aimed at audiences with different expertise, ranging from health professionals to laypeople. Her current funded research projects explore how migrant communities and their hosts use translation technologies in healthcare contexts. Fueled by her work in the translation industry, she also researches audiovisual indirect translation, focusing on ethics and sustainability.

She has published on these topics in a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in highly-regarded journals such as Target, The Translator, Translation Spaces and The Journal of Specialised Translation. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Perspectives on Pivot Audiovisual Translation (2023) and a special issue of Translation Studies on Translation Trust (2025).

She is the co-founder and co-coordinator of the recent Network of Interdisciplinary Translation Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders, a regional interdisciplinary network of researchers working on translation and related fields, aiming to strengthen academic collaboration in the region. She is the review editor and board member of the open-access Journal of Audiovisual Translation, and she has acted as a peer-reviewer for major journals in the field of Translation Studies.

Her doctoral thesis (Summa Cum Laude, 2019) and short-listed for the EST Young Scholar Prize, conducted in co-tutelle between Lisbon and Ghent universities, dealt with medical translation.

Curriculum vitae

Teaching
Susana has been teaching at the university level for more than 13 years. She started her teaching career as an invited assistant at NOVA University in Portugal where she taught for eight years business, technical, and scientific translation, among other topics, at the BA and MA levels. She was responsible for the curricula (including the design of materials) of all the courses taught, and introduced and designed the course Introduction to Subtitling. She also taught Media translation and Literary Translation at the University of Lisbon.

Shortly after defending her PhD, she started her current position at Leiden where she teaches translation theory and methods, medical translation, translation technology, and subtitling in the Minor Translation and the MA Translation. She was responsible for creating and designing the new specialization course on Medical translation (the first in the Netherlands and neighbouring countries) and the course Multilingual to English Translation.

Thesis supervision
Susana supervises BA, MA and PhD theses in Translation Studies, especially on medical translation and technology. At NOVA University (Portugal) she supervised more than 20 MA thesis, and in the last three years at Leiden she has supervised more than 10 as a first reader.
She is available for PhD supervision in her field of expertise and welcomes motivated and qualified applications on her specialization.

Previous academic positions

Academic degrees

Key publications

Peer reviewed articles (selection)

• Valdez, Susana, Leticia Pablos Robles and Karin van den Berg. (Under review) “Investigating the reception of translated vaccination information: evidence from a reading and stops-making-sense judgment task.” Target (37).
• Pięta, Hanna and Susana Valdez. (Unconditionally accepted) “Migration and translation technologies” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Migration, edited by Brigid Maher et al. London: Routledge.
• Valdez, Susana. 2023. “More than terminology - Medical translation training.” In termen van taal, edited by Piet van Sterkenburg et al, 335-343. Schiedam: Scriptum.
• Torres-Simón, Esther, Susana Valdez, Hanna Pięta, and Rita Menezes. 2023. “Is indirect translation a friend or a foe of sustainable development?” Translation Spaces 12 (2): 204 – 230.
• Valdez, Susana, Ana Guerberof-Arenas and Kars Ligtenberg. 2023. “Migrant communities living in the Netherlands and their use of MT in health contexts.” In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, edited by Mary Nurminen et al., 325-334. Tampere: EAMT.
• Valdez, Susana. 2023. “On the reception of biomedical translation.” The Translator 28 (4): 538-554.
• Dorst, Lettie, Susana Valdez, and Heather Bouman. 2022. “Machine translation in the multilingual classroom.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 8 (1): 49-66.
• Valdez, Susana. 2021a. “Literalization in the self-revision process of novice and experienced biomedical translators.” Cognitive Linguistic Studies 8 (2): 356–377.
• Valdez, Susana. 2021b. “Beliefs, Attitudes and Expectations on How to Translate Medical and Biomedical Content.” In Multilingual Academic and Professional Communication in a Networked World. Vilanova i la Geltrú: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
• Valdez, Susana, and Sonia Vandepitte. 2021. "Exploring a Two-Way Street. Revisers’ and translators’ attitudes and expectations about each other in biomedical translation." In Translation revision and post editing: industry practices and cognitive procsses, edited by Maarit Koponen et al, 148-164. London: Routledge. 

Editor of special issues (forthcoming) 

• Pięta, Hanna, Susana Valdez, Rita Menezes and Stravoula Sokoli (eds.) 2023. "Pivot audiovisual translation: A burning issue for research and training." Special issue of Perspectives. 
• Hu, Bei, Susana Valdez and Valentina Ragni (eds.) 2025. “(De)constructing trust in high-stakes intercultural mediation: Theoretical, methodological and practical challenges.” Special issue of Translation Studies.