Ms Alisa Tian

Alisa is an Associate Lecturer in translation and interpreting at the School of Humanities and Languages, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW. She has a Master of Philosophy degree in translation pedagogy from UNSW, a Master of Translation and Interpreting degree from Western Sydney University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Advanced Chinese Studies from UNSW.

Alisa is a passionate translation/interpreting practitioner, teacher, and researcher. She has extensive practical experience in T&I since 2006, including translation and interpreting in different contexts. She specialises in legal interpreting and subtitling. She has worked in trials and hearings at different courts and tribunals, including several high-profile trials featured in the news. She also provides expert opinions to court and private law firms. She is a subtitler and translation quality checker for SBS Australia working on programs of various genres, including comedy drama The Family Law (Seasons 1-3), documentary Australia in Colour (Seasons 1-2), and a range of Chinese variety shows, dramas, and documentaries. She currently works on SBS's renowned current affairs programs Dateline and Insight. 

She has taught across a range of translation and interpreting courses at UNSW since 2010, including Legal Interpreting and Media Translation, as well as Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE) offered to students across different disciplines at UNSW. With consistently positive feedback from students, she has achieved high levels of student satisfaction rates that surpass the school, faculty, and university averages, including 100% student satisfaction rates (MyExperience) for several courses she taught and coordinated. She has been awarded one of the inaugural Casual Staff Teaching Awards from the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW in 2021.

She is also a PhD candidate at UNSW, working on translation pedagogy under the supervision of Associate Professor Mira Kim. Her research interests focus on translation pedagogy and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). After receiving a prestigious award for her MPhil thesis, her PhD project builds upon the MPhil research by establishing a wider scope, aiming to bridge the gap between translation theory and practice in the classroom.