Talk:Mona Baker

undue
This is not an objective article. Though the ideas are quotated, it seems that the wikipedia assumes the critic to Mona Baker as anti-semitic. Every quotation goes in this direction, especially this:


 * According to Prof. Jon Pike, "Mona Baker's policy is, in effect, anti-semitic: she doesn't want to have contact with any individuals who are affiliated with Israeli institutions, and those people will largely be Jews. And we know, of course, that Mona Baker thinks these actions are "appropriate" (and, when criticised, complains bitterly about the Jewish press)."

I would just say that she is criticised, and take then the notes. We must not say every word the critics say, and we should at the same time search for critics in the opposite direction.--87.222.163.92 (talk) 11:24, 30 May 2009 (UTC)


 * She aroused great antagonism because she imposed a special ideological litmus test on the academic opportunities which she controls -- a litmus test which a large number of Jews in academia would not be able to satisfy in good conscience. I don't know that we need to speculate on her motives and sentiments in great detail, but it remains a fact that a significant number of people had feelings of resentment at the possibility that Mona Baker represented (i.e. that they would have to jump through arbitrary hoops contradictory to their deeply-held views in order to have a chance at certain good career opportunities). AnonMoos (talk) 22:18, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Restructuring of the article
Dear fellow Wikipedians. I am a translator who attended an event held by Mrs Baker back in September 2010 and I have a different picture from what was stated at this article (so far). As I saw that almost all the article was devoted to discussions related to the Middle East conflict (which, frankly speaking, I don't know with the necessary depth), I decided to further expand the article, including a "linguistics-only" section, named "Career". The rest of the article has been renamed as a section, Mona Baker and the Middle East Conflict. Best regards, --Fadesga (talk) 15:41, 14 December 2010 (UTC)


 * However, the header structure needs to be such that sub-sections on the controversy are shown to be parts of the main section on the controversy... AnonMoos (talk) 13:52, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Considering that Dr. Baker openly and proudly discriminates based on nationality, its not surprising that much of the article is devoted to this subject. Feel free to add new material, but the controversy section is more than justified in its current form.(Hyperionsteel (talk) 21:22, 6 October 2011 (UTC))

2021
I beg to differ. It is very surprising that much (in fact, the biggest part) of the article is about "Middle East conflict and Israeli academics". This would be justified if Baker's only claim to recognition is the controversy. But this is certainly not the case. Mona Baker was a major figure in modern translation studies before these events, and she remains so today. She established one of the first and major translation journals, the first encyclopedia about translation studies (which remains a major reference today), and the first publishing house dedicated to translation, and she is the founder of a whole theoretical approach to translation studies (narrative theory). She is also credited with introducing corpus studies into translation research. She recently had a translation research center established in her name by Shanghai International Studies University. All this is absent from the article. There is only a brief introduction about her career where we know she is a professor at Manchester University with the usual academic credentials, then the greater part of the article (four or five times as much) is dedicated to the controversy. In fact, you can call this basically an article about the controversy pure and simple, with the biographical information serving as an intro. If you want to dedicate an entire article to this issue, then this is fine, and would be even more proper. But this is not how a biographical article is done. Check any article about a prominent figure, and see if this is the case. There are people who were Nazi collaborators whose biographical articles did not lend such weigh to the controversy. Just two examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Schmidt -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:7081:5D07:E706:296D:E389:DEF3:2528 (talk) 15:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * 2603:7081:5D07:E706:296D:E389:DEF3:2528 -- Mona Baker was involved in a bitter controversy with wide political consequences in the Internet era (she was specifically condemned by the UK prime minister and parliament -- not too many academics can say this!). Therefore it's inevitable that this article will cover the controversy.  If you want to add more on her academic achievements, go ahead, but cutting down sourced Wikipedia coverage of a notable incident because there's more about that than about other aspects of her career would be somewhat artificial, and I'm not too sure that it would be required by any Wikipedia policy... AnonMoos (talk) 07:52, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * No one says it should not cover the controversy, and no one asked for this to be removed. But the article cannot be focused on this event no matter how big, unless, as stated above, this is her claim to fame--which is certainly not the case. An article like this should be focused on her life and achievements, with one section (with a title like "Controversies") discussing this. I the author is not qualified to handle the topic, then they should not have created the article to highlight a political issue. 2603:7081:5D41:6723:29FD:8AB6:E061:9A1A (talk) 23:48, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The incident is actually the widest publicity she received outside of narrow scholarly circles, so some might argue that it basically is her main claim to fame. AnonMoos (talk) 20:57, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

quasi-connection to current events
Hosting this on her site: http://www.monabaker.com/pMachine/more.php?id=A2918_0_1_0_M -- AnonMoos (talk) 14:06, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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 * Added tag to http://www.aipti.org/noticias/not23-encuentro-con-mona-baker.html
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130911085239/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/622/cu4.htm to http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/622/cu4.htm
 * Added tag to http://www.est-translationstudies.org/intranet/newsletter/SesameNewsl20.pdf

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