Your Faculty

Clorinda Donato, Ph.D.

Director, Donato Center
Professor of Italian and French
Undergraduate and Graduate Certificate Advisor

Translation has always played a significant role in Clorinda Donato’s cultural studies and language pedagogy research and teaching since receiving her PhD at UCLA in Romance Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She has published six volumes including co-edited works, and over 100 articles and book chapters on her topics of research: Romance languages, translation studies, and eighteenth-century studies. She has recently published Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations 1680–1830s, with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, University of Toronto Press, 2021. Her monograph, The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science and Sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Italy and England, which contains her new translation from Italian into English of the novella about an eighteenth-century case of transgender, appeared with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment in 2020. Also in 2020, John Fante’s ASK THE DUST: A Joining of Voices, co-edited with Stephen Cooper, was published by Fordham University Press in their Italian American Series. The textbook, Juntos: Italian for Speakers of English and Spanish, produced with co-authors Cedric Joseph Oliva, Daniela Zappador-Guerra, and Manuel Romero, was published with Hackett Publishing Company in 2020. She was the Principal Investigator for the NEH-funded project “French and Italian for Spanish Speakers” 2011-2014. Together with Manuel Romero and Alessandra Balzani, she edits Translation Becomes Eclectic, a student translation journal.

Adrià Martín-Mor, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Translation Studies

Adrià Martín-Mor obtained his PhD at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Catalonia) with a thesis on translation technologies. As a professor, he has taught and coordinated translation-related courses in Catalan and Sardinian universities. As a scholar, he is interested in translation technologies (with a focus on their political dimension) and minoritized languages, mainly Catalan and Sardinian. Some of his recent publications include “Tecnologies lingüístiques per a llengües minoritzades: el cas de l’alguerès” (Revista de Llengua i Dret, 2020), “Limbas minorizadas e ativismu linguìsticu in s’acadèmia” (América Crítica, 2019), and “Do Translation Memories Affect Texts? Results of the TRACE Project” (Perspectives: studies in translation theory and practice, 2019). Outside of academia, he is one of the founding members of Sardware, a Sardinian association of volunteer translators that localize free software (such as Telegram, Firefox, Ubuntu, etc.) into Sardinian. Some of his creative projects include a TV program that aired on the Italian public broadcasting company, RAI, about the languages of Sardinia. The program, called Beni cun me (“come with me,” in Sardinian; trailer here), featured songs written by himself that were later released as his latest CD, Lo somrís de la magrana (“the smile of the pomegranate,” in reference to a Sardinian saying).

Giulia Togato, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Translation Studies 

Dr. Togato received her Ph.D. in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Granada. She has been actively working as a translator and consecutive interpreter for the past 15 years, using Italian, Spanish, and English as her main languages. She is especially interested in editorial translation services and specialized translation. Dr. Togato has recently translated into Spanish for Alianza Editorial The Happiness Fantasy, by Carl Cederström (Wiley, 2018), and Memory (2nd Edition), by Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck, and Michael C. Anderson (Psychology Press, 2014). She is a certified editorial translator in Spain.

​Dr. Togato’s interdisciplinary research merges the fields of cognitive psychology and translation. She has recently started The Think2Talk Lab, housed by the Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures at CSULB, where she investigates the interaction between Cognition, Translation, and Bilingualism. She explores the different ways in which bilinguals and translators handle their languages from the psycholinguistic point of view, focusing on the cognitive regulation of resources underlying consistent practice in their specific tasks. Her research interests include the cognitive and emotional aspects of language processing in translation and bilingualism, figurative language processing and embodied cognition in the first and second languages of translators and bilinguals, automaticity, and cognitive control in translation and bilingualism.

Dr. Togato teaches a diverse set of courses in CSULB’s Translation Studies Program. Her teaching approach is informed by constant observation of today’s translation market, interdisciplinarity, and the importance of the scientific method in translation research.

Aparna Nayak, Ph.D.

Department Chair, RGRLL
Professor of French

Dr. Nayak’s received her Ph.D. in French from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interest in 20th-century French literature and Francophone literatures and cultures center on the inter-relations between literature, memory, history, and politics. In 20th-century French literature, her work on immediate post-war writings engages with questions of remembrance and forgetting; she has also worked on the immediate pre-war period, specifically the cultural politics of the Popular Front government. She has published peer-reviewed essays on works by Nancy Huston as well as Tahar Ben Jelloun, also dealing with questions of politics and memory. In the past, she has translated research documents on the Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy for the independent scholar, Marshall Katz, in preparation for his monographs on Palissy’s works. She is currently working on a translation of the memoir Retour d’Auschwitz by Guy Kohen.

Jessica Powell, Ph.D.

Lecturer of Translation Studies

Jessica Powell received her BA in International Studies from Vassar College, her MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, and completed her Ph.D. in UCSB’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, specializing in literary translation and twentieth-century Latin American Literature. She has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s novel Woman in Battle Dress (City Lights, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Her translation, the first-ever into English of Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October of 2017. Other translations include Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Melville House, 2013) and Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise (City Lights Books, 2019), both co-translated with Suzanne Jill Levine; Edna Iturralde’s Green Was my Forest, a 2019 Skipping Stones Honor Award recipient (Mandel Vilar, Press, 2018); and Gabriela Wiener’s Nine Moons (Restless Books, May 2020), a 2021 Firecracker Award finalist. Her translation of Sergio Missana’s novel Las muertes paralelas, was published in November 2021 by McPherson & Company, under the English title The Transentients. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA with her husband Abe, her kids Olivia and Leo, and her dogs Hazel and Blue.

Manuel Romero

Associate Director, Donato Center
Lecturer of Translation Studies

Manuel Romero is Associate Director of The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies and Lecturer of Translation Studies at CSULB. He received an MA in Italian Studies from California State University, Long Beach and completed an MA Thesis entitled, “Chronicling the Encounter: Wilderness and ‘Civilized’ Spaces in Filippo Salvatore Gilij's Essay on American History.” To date, his research has focused on Jesuit accounts of the New World, Spanish encyclopedism, Translation Studies, and Intercomprehension. He has published in the Journal of Italian Translation, Dieciocho, the Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, and The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment, and is a coauthor of Juntos: Italian for Speakers of English and Spanish. Together with Clorinda Donato and Alessandra Balzani, he edits Translation Becomes Eclectic, a student translation journal.

Alessandra Balzani

Lecturer of Translation Studies

Alessandra Balzani received an MA in Italian Studies from California State University, Long Beach, with a focus on language acquisition and the condition of the Italian language in the context of U.S. multilingualism. Her academic background includes a BA in Translation Studies from the University of Bologna at Forlì (Italy), and a BA in Anthropology from Durham University (UK), with a focus in linguistic anthropology. Together with Clorinda Donato and Manuel Romero, she edits Translation Becomes Eclectic, a student translation journal.