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 language use across various contexts. These include discourse analysis of social media data, multimodal analysis of interpreting processes, translation technologies, as well as computational linguistics. 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

Video Remote Interpreting for Equitable Healthcare

Australia has witnessed a surging use of video remote interpreting in medical consultations involving people from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This innovation in language services is to ensure the accessibility, effectiveness, and equity of patient care. However, health communication in hospital settings is a high-stakes context where various stakeholders’ opinions need to be engaged to fully understand the challenges and realities that shadow the linguistic quality of interpreting practices. This study aims to investigate how interpreters, health professionals, and language service managers working in the healthcare industry in Australia experience with video remote interpreting in the post-covid era.

Trust or distrust AI-powered machine translation

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 tools such as GPT4.0 perform at a comparable level with human translators in this regard?

Conference Presentations

The following conference presentations are downloadable for view:

Yao, X., & Nie, P. (2024, March). Translanguaging in linguistic landscapes: New scripts in Yi (彝) students' handwritten signs. Paper accepted for presentation at AAAL 2024, Houston, Texas.

Yao, X., & Hu, B. (2023, November). Dis(trusting) technologies: The impact of video remote interpreting on a Melbourne hospital. Paper accepted for presentation at the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) 2023 National Conference, Sydney.

Yao, X., & Nie, P. (2023, September). Utopia and dystopia: Language policies and ethnic minorities in the Chinese linguistic landscapes. Paper accepted for presentation at 14th Linguistic Landscape Workshop, Madrid, Spain.

Yao, X., & Nie, P. (2023, June). Language ideologies and attitudes towards ethnic minority migrants: The linguistic landscape of a Han Chinese-Tibetan community in Chengdu, China. Paper presented at 14th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Sydney, Australia.

Yao, X. (2022, November). Affect in the linguistic landscape: A tale of two Chinese restaurants. Paper presented at LCNAU Seventh Biennial Colloquium, Melbourne, Australia.

Yao, X. & Nambu, S. (2021, September). Multilingual official signs in the linguistic landscapes of Japanese Brazilian communities. Paper presented at British Association of Applied Linguistics 2021 Conference, UK (online).

Samantha, X. & Yao, X. (2021, September). Languages, mahjong, and semiotic assemblages: Chinese restaurants in the urban and rural landscapes. Paper presented at British Association of Applied Linguistics 2021 Conference, UK (online).

Yao, X. (2021, June). Translanguaging on public signs: The linguistic landscape of Melbourne. Poster presented at 6th Language for Specific Purposes and Professional Communication Conference (LSPPC6), Hong Kong (online).

Yao, X. (2021, June). Unsettling linguistic landscapes: Metrolingualism in the collapsed context of WeChat. Paper presented at Sociolinguistic Symposium 23, Hong Kong (online).

Yao, X., Phan, N., & Urribarrí, J. (2021, November). Linguistic landscapes: Languages, materialities and identities. Chaired Panel Session at Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) Annual Conference 2021, Australia.

Yao, X. (2020, November). Exclusion in the ephemeral linguistic landscape. Paper presented at Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) Annual Conference 2020, Australia (online).

Yao, X. (2019, June). Power of Chinese assemblages: An ethnographic investigation of the linguistic landscape of Bendigo. Paper presented at XIScape: 11th Linguistic Landscape Workshop, Bangkok, Thailand.

Yao, X. (2018, September). Beneath the sign: The linguistic landscape of a rural township in Australia. Paper presented at 2nd International Conference on Sociolinguistics, Budapest, Hungary.

Yao, X. (2018, June). Journeys into the rural linguistic landscape. Paper presented at Ethnoforum, Melbourne, Australia.

Yao, X. (2017, September). Indexing identities: Bilingual messages in the linguistic landscape. Paper presented at Identities in Translation International Workshop 2017, Melbourne, Australia.

Other Academic Activities