Maria Elisa FINA

Position
Researcher
Telephone
041 234 6680
E-mail
mariaelisa.fina@unive.it
Scientific sector (SSD)
Lingua, traduzione e linguistica inglese [ANGL-01/C]
Website
www.unive.it/people/mariaelisa.fina (personal record)
Office
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies
Website: https://www.unive.it/dep.dslcc
Where: Palazzo Cosulich
Office
Interdepartmental School of Economics, Languages and Entrepreneurship
Website: https://www.unive.it/sele
Where: Treviso - Palazzo San Paolo
Research Institute
Research Institute for Digital and Cultural Heritage

Maria Elisa Fina graduated in 2011 in Literary and Technical-Scientific Translation at the University of Salento (English-Russian language pair), with a research thesis in English Language and Translation on tourism communication in English using Web 2.0 technologies. She obtained her PhD in ‘Linguistic, Historical-Literary and Intercultural Studies’ in 2016 with a thesis on the multimodal analysis of audio tourist guides in contrastive Italian/English entitled On Effective Audio Guiding. A Multimodal Investigation of Italian, British and American Audio Guides.

From 2018 to 2023 she was Researcher on fixed-term contract ‘A’ (RtdA) at the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies, Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is currently Researcher on fixed-term contract ‘B’ (RtdB) at the same Department.

Her research topics mainly focus on English for the promotion of cultural heritage, with a particular interest in multimodal genres, and on translation in the field of tourism. In the three-year period 2018-2021, she worked mainly on museum communication for children and on intersemiotic translation and resemiotization in the field of cultural heritage promotion. She is also collaborating on a project on collaborative translation and revision. Previously, she was also interested in corpus linguistics.

In 2017, she won the 2017 AIA/Carocci National PhD Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Anglistics, awarded by the Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (AIA), thanks to which in 2018 she published her research in a volume of the series ‘Lingue e Letterature’ of the Carocci publishing house, entitled Investigating Effective Audio Guiding. A Multimodal Comparison of the genre in Italian and English. In 2021 she was awarded the Prize Fund assigned by the Dept. of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies for excellence in scientific production.

She is the author of various articles published mainly in A-ranked international journals and has participated as a speaker, also by invitation, at various national and international conferences. She participated as a speaker and member of the scientific committee at the TranslatingEurope Workshop ‘Specialist Translation in Tourism and Cultural Heritage Promotion: New Challenges in Vocational Training’ at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Brescia campus), sponsored by the European Commission as part of the TranslatingEurope project of the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission, and an event forming part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage.

She took part in the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Teaching Assistant programme in the academic years 2018-2019 (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and 2019-2020 (University of Graz), being awarded the University's funding in both years.

She has translated various specialist texts, essays and research projects into English and has been responsible for proofreading English translations in the medical field. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Trans-Kata - Journal of Language, Literature, Culture, and Education and Le Simplegadi.

She has joined several training programmes provided by Ca' Foscari, including Academic Lecturing (September-December 2018).

In 2025, she qualified for the position of associate professor.