Founded in 2005, SMU’s School of Foreign Studies has become a teaching and research center for medical language and translation in Guangdong Province. The School boasts a faculty comprising 53 members, about 40% of whom are full or associate professors. And about 54% of the faculty are PhDs or PhD candidates in foreign language and literature, translation studies, management or medical sciences. There are three main teaching divisions: the English Department, the College English Teaching Center and the Medical English Teaching & Research Center. The School has built a medical English teaching team, the only provincially accredited one of the kind in Guangdong.
The School currently offers two undergraduate programs, namely Medical English and Translation & Interpreting. Notably, a professional master’s program in Translation & Interpreting, commonly known as MTI, was nationally accredited in July, 2021, a new milestone in the School’s history of disciplinary development. The School’s undergraduate and master’s programs possess two prominent resource advantages, i.e. an inter-disciplinary advantage combining English and Medical Science backed by SMU’s predominant medicinal disciplines, and a geographic advantage of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, an international innovation and technology hub. Giving full play to such advantages, the School is committed to cultivating talents to meet an increasing demand for high-quality healthcare language professionals in the Greater Bay Area. The curriculum is so designed as to train students with a profound bilingual competence, a broad international vision, an in-depth humanistic quality, and a solid medical knowledge, coupled with a comprehensive set of abilities in language use, cross-cultural communication, independent thinking, self-innovation, and continuous learning. Over the years, the School has prepared students for career success in healthcare-related language services such as medical translation & interpreting, medical management, medical language training and the like. Graduates of the School have shown distinct advantages and competitiveness in job opportunities offered by medical institutions, pharmaceutical enterprises, translation companies, medical publishing houses, English education institutions, etc.
The School has complete teaching & learning facilities such as independent labs for audio-visual language training, computer-aided translation, and simultaneous interpreting and the like. There is a library of foreign language and literature on Shunde campus and Guangzhou campus with a total of 7,490 paper books, 2,000 e-books, and 32 scholarly journals, which can meet students’ needs in professional learning. Additionally, the School has already built an online English-Chinese bilingual corpus for medical studies and a professional website for medical English learning called “Old West English”.
By far, the School has made remarkable achievements in talent training. There are currently 185 enrolled students in the School, with some 80 new entrants each year. For over a decade, a total of 1,144 undergraduates have completed their studies, with 95% of them obtaining a BA degree. About 95% of the graduates get employed, including over 30% of them continuing to study for an MA or even PhD degree. The School’s students have won more than 100 awards in foreign language competitions at or above the provincial level.
The School’s research team highlights inter-disciplinary studies crossing the borders of foreign studies and medical studies like, e.g. studies on medical language & culture, on medical literature, and on medical translation & interpreting. So far, medical English and related studies are gaining momentum with the team’s coordinated efforts like, for instance, establishing the Institute of Medical Language and Culture, launching the Journal of Medical Language and Culture, and building sub-teams in carrying out intensive research in medical language, medical humanities, medical translation & interpreting, and medical literature, etc. Over the past five years, the School’s research team has published 15 monographs and textbooks, and 48 high-quality papers including 23 SSCI or CSSCI papers. Moreover, the team has undertaken 15 provincial and/or national research projects, in addition to 13 more projects approved by the Department of Education of Guangdong Province.
In recent years, based on the School’s Medical Language Service Center, the faculty and students are actively engaged in social services, and a wide array of language services have been offered like, e.g. translation & interpreting services in APASL Single Topic Conference 2020 - Portal Hypertension and End Stage Liver Disease and the 36th SICOT Orthopedic World Congress in 2015. The School is also a designated organizer of foreign language training for international medical aid by the Health Commission of Guangdong Province. Early in 2020, at the initial stage of the outbreak of COVID-19, a translation team composed of 7 faculty members out of the School were involved in the translation of Prevention against COVID-19, a manual issued by the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to intercollegiate programs provided by SMU and its partners worldwide, the School is also endeavoring to offer students some tailor-made overseas exchange opportunities. For example, the School is currently negotiating with the University of Birmingham in the UK for a joint degree program with an alternative “2+2” or “3+1” mode. Also, the School has established friendly cooperative relations with counterparts in some other universities abroad like, e.g. the Ohio State University in the US, the University of Northampton in the UK, and the University of Tasmania in Australia.
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