Maria Elisa FINA

Maria Elisa Fina graduated in Literary and Scientific-Technical Translation from the University of Salento in 2011 (English-Russian language pair), with a research thesis in English Language and Translation focusing on tourism communication in English through Web 2.0 technologies. In 2016, she earned her PhD in Linguistic, Historical-Literary and Intercultural Studies with a dissertation titled "On Effective Audio Guiding. A Multimodal Investigation of Italian, British and American Audio Guides," which explored the multimodal analysis of tourist audio guides from a contrastive Italian/English perspective.

She is currently Associate Professor of English Language, Translation and Linguistics (ANG-01/C) at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies. She previously held fixed-term research positions as senior researcher (RtdB) (2023-2026) and as junior researcher (RtdA) (2018–2023) within the same department.

Her research interests lie in English language communication for the promotion of cultural heritage, investigated through a contrastive English-Italian lens and a multimodal approach. Following an in-depth multimodal study of the (city) audio guide genre in Italian and English (doctoral thesis), she has examined audio-guided museum communication for children, again adopting a multimodal perspective, resulting in two publications on the topic. Her current research interests include the study of methods and approaches in the didactics of intersemiotic translation (also for the heritage translator) and the post-editing of machine translation.

In 2017 she was awarded the national "AIA/Carocci PhD Prize 2017" by the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA) for the best doctoral dissertation in English Studies. This recognition led to the 2018 publication of her research as a volume titled Investigating Effective Audio Guiding. A Multimodal Comparison of the Genre in Italian and English in the Lingue e Letterature series by Carocci publisher. In 2021, she received the Incentive Fund awarded by the Department of Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Studies for the excellence of her publications.

She is the author of numerous articles published predominantly in high-quality international journals (A rank in the Italian classification system) and has participated as a speaker in various national and international conferences. She participated as a speaker and member of the scientific committee at the TranslatingEurope Workshop "Specialised translation in the field of tourism and cultural heritage promotion: new challenges for vocational training" at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Brescia campus), sponsored by the European Commission within the TranslatingEurope project of the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission, an event also part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage.

She participated in the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Teaching Assistant program in the academic years 2018-2019 (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and 2019-2020 (University of Graz), receiving funding from Ca' Foscari University in both years.

She has translated various specialised texts, essays, and research projects into English and worked as a proof-reader of 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 attended numerous training programs provided by Ca' Foscari University, including "Academic Lecturing" (September-December 2018).

In 2025 she obtained the National Scientific Qualification in the academic recruitment field 10/L1, which makes her eligible for the role of Associate Professor in English language, translation and linguistics.