Sonia Colina

About

Sonia Colina is a Regents Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She joined the University of Arizona in 2006, after serving as an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Translation Certificate Program at Arizona State University. Prior to that, she spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Indiana University. Her academic background includes degrees in linguistics and Spanish, reflecting her expertise in these fields. Colina's research primarily focuses on two areas: Spanish Phonology and Translation Studies/Applied Linguistics. In phonology, her work is situated within the generative phonology framework, specifically optimality theory, with a focus on syllabification processes such as glides, diphthongs, and resyllabification. She also investigates how phonological theory can inform empirical and laboratory research, and she extends her phonological research to the study of Galician, a Romance language closely related to Portuguese. In the field of Translation Studies and Applied Linguistics, Colina's research interests include translation pedagogy, language and translation competence acquisition, and translation quality assessment. She explores the connections between communicative translation and language acquisition, and she is dedicated to applied translation studies, aiming to apply research findings to solve practical problems in translation, such as…

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Medical education
• Medicine
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Improving Consumer Understanding of Medical Text: Development and Validation of a New SubSimplify Algorithm to Automatically Generate Term Explanations in English and Spanish

  Journal of Medical Internet Research · 2018-06-16 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: While health literacy is important for people to maintain good health and manage diseases, medical educational texts are often written beyond the reading level of the average individual. To mitigate this disconnect, text simplification research provides methods to increase readability and, therefore, comprehension. One method of text simplification is to isolate particularly difficult terms within a document and replace them with easier synonyms (lexical simplification) or an explana…

  PublisherDOI

• Interaction in bilingual early speech acquisition: Acceleration in the bilingual acquisition of English liquids for English-Spanish bilinguals

  Lingua · 2022 · 5 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Research Documents for Populations with Limited English Proficiency: Translation Approaches Matter

  Ethics & Human Research · 2021 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  To avoid excluding individuals with limited English proficiency from participating in research, the consent form and other documents should be presented to them in their primary language and in a format that is understandable. However, evidence suggests that, when documents are translated for prospective and actual research participants with limited English proficiency, these individuals often fail to engage with the documents and the research in the same terms as their English-speaking counterp…

  PublisherDOI

• Spirantization in Spanish: The role of the underlying representation

  Linguistics · 2019-12-04 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Spirantization is one of the most frequently studied phonological phenomena of Spanish (Barlow, Jessica A. 2003. The stop-spirant alternation in Spanish: Converging evidence for a fortition account. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 22. 51–86; Zampini, Mary. 1994. The role of native language transfer and task formality in the acquisition of Spanish spirantization. Hispania 77. 470–481; among others). For a majority of dialects, Spanish voiced plosives have been traditionally described as…

  PublisherDOI

• Language proficiency in translation and interpreting programs

  Translation and Interpreting Studies · 2025-11-17 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This article examines the relationship between language proficiency and translation and interpreting (T&I) education in U.S. programs, focusing on language preparedness and development. This mixed-methods study investigates course prerequisites, proficiency requirements, and perceptions of administrators and instructors regarding students’ expected versus observed proficiency levels. Findings reveal a mismatch between expected and average proficiency when entering a program, with bo…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Maria Berlin

  Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena

  49 shared

• Stuart Croft

  Baidu (China)

  49 shared

• Denis Tucson

  Baidu (China)

  49 shared

• Volker Gast

  Friedrich Schiller University Jena

  49 shared

• Walter Bisang

  Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

  49 shared

• Heike Behrens

  University of Basel

  49 shared

• Tel Aviv

  Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena

  49 shared

• W. S. Lyon

  Vanderbilt University

  49 shared

Similar researchers at University of Arizona

• Ana Maria Carvalhoh-50
• Miquel Simoneth-20
• Monica P Moralesh-14