My Passion

I am curious about the relationship between language, culture and society. My doctoral research was inspired by my observation of linguistic diversity in multilingual societies and my disconnection with Chinese community in the overseas context. I studied the linguistic landscape of the Chinese diaspora in Australia and showed how power, culture and place inform interpretation of linguistic and semiotic practices of people. My study challenges the rural-urban and online-offline boundaries in sociolinguistic research and advances an understanding of the heterogeneity within Chinese communities.

I have broad research interests in multilingualism across various contexts. I am intrigued by the diversity and fluidity of language practices in public, school, and family, as well as technology-mediated communicative contexts, such as translation technologies and social media. I am an analytical and curious researcher who is keen to experiment with interdisciplinary research methods and question their theoretical premises as applied to the analysis of languages. 

Current Projects

Linguistics Applied in Big Data and AI

Can we trust AI/machine translation of literature?

Although generative AI holds the promise of producing accurate, complete, nuanced, and human-like use of language, its utility in translation, especially Chinese-English literary translations, has been scarcely researched. Literary translation is often conceived the “last fortress” of human translation, and an area where the performance of (neural) machine translation is particularly controversial due to the lack of creativity, lexical, structural, pragmatic errors, and inconsistent stylistic features. Would generative AI models such as GPT perform at a comparable level with human translators in this regard?

Academic Activities