Dr Louisa Desilla is an Assistant Professor in the School of English Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She completed her PhD thesis entitled Towards a Methodology for the Study of Implicatures in Subtitled Films: Multimodal Construal and Reception of Pragmatic Meaning Across Cultures at The University of Manchester in 2009. She was awarded an MA in Translation Studies (2005) by the same institution and, prior to that, she obtained a first-class BA in English Language and Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She has 12 years of teaching experience in UK Higher Education Institutions, her principal area of expertise being Audiovisual Translation. She has also taught Specialised Translation, Translation Theory and Intercultural Communication at The University of Manchester, University College London, University of Surrey and London Metropolitan University, as well as in the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting (DFLTI) of the Ionian University, Greece.
Her principal research interests reside in the pragmatics of intercultural communication, audiovisual translation and media accessibility, as well as in audience reception. She is currently exploring the pragmatics of audio description and computer mediated communication (CMC).
Dr Desilla was co-investigator in the AHRC-funded networking project entitled Tapping the Power of Foreign Films: Audiovisual Translation as Cross-cultural Mediation (2016-2017) in collaboration with the University of East Anglia. She is currently co-investigator in the PLOUTOS project(cooPeration for achieving third country nationaLs’ financial independence thrOUgh financial liTeracy tOols and entrepreunerShip bootcamps) funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General Migration and Home Affairs (2022-2025).
She is the author of Translation and Pragmatics: Theories and Applications (Routledge, 2024). She has also co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics (2019) and published her research in international academic journals in the fields of Linguistics and Translation, such as the Journal of Pragmatics and The Translator.
Selected publications include:
MONOGRAPH
Desilla, L. (2024) Translation and Pragmatics: Theories and Applications. London and New York: Routledge.
REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
Alvanoudi, A., & Desilla, L. (2022). Exploring the collateral impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication:: Displaying affect in email discourse. Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics, 3, 230–246. Retrieved from https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/awpel/article/view/30237
Desilla, L. (2019) "Happily lost in translation: misunderstandings in film dialogue". Multilingua: Journal of Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication 39(2): 601-618.https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0123
Desilla, L. (2014) "Reading between the lines, seeing beyond the images: an empirical study on the comprehension of implicit film dialogue meaning across cultures". The Translator 20(2): 194-214. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2014.96747
Desilla, L. (2012) "Implicatures in film: construal and functions in Bridget Jones romantic comedies". Journal of Pragmatics 44(1): 30-35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.10.002
CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES
Desilla, L. (2019) "Experimental pragmatics meets audiovisual translation: tackling methodological challenges in researching how audiences understand implicatures". In Tipton, R. and L. Desilla (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 93-114.
Desilla, L. (2018) "Pragmatics". In. L. Perez-Gonzalez (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation Studies. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 242-258
EDITED VOLUMES
Tipton, R. and L. Desilla (eds) (2019) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
