Rate My Professor Sonia Colina

Sonia Colina is Regents Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of Arizona, where she also serves as Director of the National Center for Interpretation and curriculum designer and coordinator for the university's Online Translation Certificate. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and an M.A. in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Prior to joining the University of Arizona in 2006, Colina was Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Translation Certificate Program at Arizona State University, and she taught translation at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. She is a founding member and past President of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA), serves on the editorial board of Translation and Interpreting Studies, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of The Translator and Interpreter Trainer. Additionally, she holds appointments as Professor in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching and in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.

Colina's research focuses on Spanish phonology in the Optimality Theory framework, with emphasis on syllable structure, glides, diphthongs, resyllabification, spirantization, and the phonology of Galician, integrating theoretical insights with empirical laboratory work. In Translation Studies and Applied Linguistics, she investigates translation pedagogy, translator competence acquisition, quality assessment using functionalist approaches, and applications in health care research, language teaching, and bilingual speech acquisition. Her major publications include Fundamentals of Translation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Phonology (Routledge, 2020, co-edited with Fernando Martínez-Gil), Spanish Phonology: A Syllabic Perspective (Georgetown University Press, 2009), Optimality-Theoretic Studies in Spanish Phonology (John Benjamins, 2006, co-edited with Fernando Martínez-Gil), and Translation Teaching: From Research to the Classroom (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Peer-reviewed articles appear in Lingua, Linguistics, Target, The Translator, and others, such as 'Spirantization in Spanish: The Role of the Underlying Representation' (Linguistics, 2020) and 'Translation Quality Assessment in Health Research' (Evaluation & the Health Professions, 2016). Colina has contributed to NIH-funded projects including Oyendo Bien (2014-2018) on hearing care for limited English proficiency populations and developed workshops for professional translators and educators. Named the first Regents Professor in her department in 2021, her scholarship bridges theory and practice, influencing translation education and phonological research.