Laura Linares

I am a Translation Studies scholar with a particular interest in how minoritised languages and cultures navigate global creative landscapes. My research explores translation both as a metaphor and as a material practice, examining how it shapes the visibility, identity, and resilience of linguistic communities across literature and digital media. I focus on Galician and other Iberian minoritised cultures, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities, and Media Studies.

I graduated with my PhD from University College Cork in 2022 and spent three years as a lecturer at the University of Limerick before re-joining UCC in 2025. My first monograph, Translation Landscapes: Contemporary Galician Fiction in English (Legenda, 2025), won the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland Publication Prize. I am currently co-authoring a second book for the Routledge Studies in Literary Translation series with my long-term collaborator Dr Olga Castro, which investigates how stateless cultures use translation as a form of cultural diplomacy. My research has appeared in leading journals such as Translation in Society, International Journal of Iberian Studies, and Perspectives, and I am currently co-editing a special issue for Target: International Journal of Translation Studies entitled Translation and/as Soft Power in the Twenty-first Century.

My second project, Replay. Resilience through Play in Minoritised Languages, builds on my research background and my professional experience as a video game translator and explores how video games can act as spaces for cultural transmission and linguistic resilience for minoritised languages in Europe. 

• Minoritised languages and translation
• Translation and soft power
• Video games, interactive media and minoritised languages
• Linguistic justice
• Corpus methodologies