Barbara Jadwiga Gawronska Pettersson

Affiliated with UiA Department of Foreign Languages and Translation

Email: barbara.gawronska@uia.no
Mobile phone: +47 45 48 90 97
Office: E1054 (Universitetsveien 25, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway)

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Background and experience

University teacher at UAM in Poznan, Poland, project researcher at the University of Lund, Sweden, professor of Computational Linguistics at Skövde, Sweden, professor of Translation Theory and Intercultural Communication at the University of Agder, Norway. In free time, translator and fiction writer.

Areas of responsibility

Barbara J. Gawronska Pettersson was born in Słupsk in northern Poland. She received her MA in Scandinavian languages from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and achieved her PhD in linguistics at the University of Lund. Since then, she works as a university lecturer. Currently, she holds the position of professor of translation theory and intercultural communication at a university in Norway.

In her free time, she writes fiction. She published two novels: Rozbita Tarcza (Broken Shield), 2018, Alter, 2020, and collections of short stories: Opowieści z Norponte (Tales from Nordponte), 2011, Szczęściarze (The Lucky Ones), 2012, and Potępieńcy (The Condemned Ones), 2013. The latter book was qualified for the Angelus Award (an award for Central European authors) in 2014.

Two of her short stories: Wheatherby, 2016, and Dom pod północnym lasem (A House by the Northern Forest), 2021, were awarded in literary competitions.

Teaching

Introduction to Linguistics and Translation theory, Text Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, BA projects, PHD courses.

Research

Semantics, morpholgy (aspect and definiteness), collocations in translation, and the history of Pomerania.

Academic interests

As above.

Research groups

Texts, interpretations, cultures

Gawronska, Barbara (2025). Pasierbowie profesora Tillberga i ich potomni. Wybitni przedstawiciele rodu von Hagenow. Wielkie Pomorze. ISSN 2956-3844. 2025, p. 95–112. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Professor Tillberg’s stepsons and their descendants: prominent representatives of the von Hagenow family The article is inspired by a previous one by the same author: an analysis of travel memoires by a Swedish poet, P. D. A. Atterbom (1790–1855). In his diary, Atterbom mentions encounters with researchers at the University of Greifswald. He devotes quite a long passage to Professor Gustav Tillberg (1777–1859), a Sweden-born mathematician and physicist. Atterbom expressed a lot of sympathy and warmth towards Tillberg, his wife, and their home; thus, given the topic of the current Great Pomerania volume, it seemed adequate to explore the history of the Tillberg family. The research shows that the wife of Gustav Tillberg was a widow of a Pomeranian noble, von Hagenow, and that her sons, Friedrich (1797–1865) and Gustav (1813–1876), educated in their youth by their Swedish stepfather, were extremely successful in many domains of public life. Friedrich von Hagenow, to whom a substantial part of this paper is devoted, was a renowned physicist and inventor, a cartographer, who produced many specialized maps of Pomerania, and, at the same time, a linguist and an archaeologist: he documented a number of runic inscriptions, petroglyphs, megalithic burial sites, and extinct Mesozoic animal species. His work is still quoted by contemporary paleontologists and historians. Friedrich’s younger brother, Gustav, was a lawyer and a politician, persecuted by the Prussian government because of his liberal views. In the next generation of the family there were also lawyers, members of local authorities, and anti-Nazi activists. Among the latter we find a remarkable woman, Katharina von Hagenow (1882–1952), a linguist and ethnologist, the co-editor of The Mecklemburg Lexicon, a book that provides knowledge not only about the province of Mecklemburg, but also about the dialects and culture of other parts of the southern Baltic coast. What united the stepchildren of Professor Tillberg and their descendants was their devotion to the past and present of their home region: the Great Pomerania.
Gawronska, Barbara (2025). A Romantic Novella’s Afterlife: Four Translations of Der Goldene Topf by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Translation Review (TR). ISSN 0737-4836. 121(1), p. 53–65. doi: 10.1080/07374836.2025.2460948. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2024). Uprooting and Taking Root: War and Post-War Pomerania in Selected Literary Works. Folk, Knowledge, Place. ISSN 3007-8849. doi: 10.24043/001c.126038. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Perceptions of home place are influenced by experiences over time and across space. Pomerania, the region stretching along the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, has a complicated history, with borders changing multiple times and populations consisting of a range of ethnic groups. This paper asks how the region of Pomerania is presented in selected German, Polish, and Kashubian literary work describing the years shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II. Focus is placed on the dramatic events of that period portrayed from a child’s perspective, with emphasis on how sense of place and understanding of culture influenced one another in those years of immense change. The texts discussed here range from novels by highly acknowledged prosaists (Stefan Chwin and Günter Grass), through memoirs by non-professional authors, to a collection of originally oral interviews. The first section of the paper provides an outline of the history of Pomerania in order to give a background the pre-war Nazi period, the war years, and the forced post-war migrations, when uprooting and of the pre-war population of both Pomerania and Eastern Poland took place. The survivors were forced to take root in a fully different geographical, ethnic, and political environment. The Methods section explains the criteria for the choice of research materials, and the subsequent sections are devoted to analysis and comparison of the literary sources, followed by a conclusion.
Gawronska, Barbara (2023). The Magic of Sound and Colour. Multimodality in Eleanor Farjeon’s Martin Pippin Books and their translations into Polish. Polilog. Studia Neofilologiczne. ISSN 2083-5485. 13(13), p. 167–182. doi: 10.34858/polilog.13.2023.402. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Eleanor Farjeon belonged to the most popular British authors writing for children in the first decades of the 20th century. However, very few of her stories have occurred in translation. There exist no translations of her major work, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, and its sequel, Marin Pippin in the Daisy Field,into German, French, Spanish, Russian, or the Scandinavian languages. One of the reasons may be that in Eleanor Farjeon’s work, sound effects play a central role. Hertexts are multimodal in many aspects, but rhyme, wordplays, and linguistic jokes pose the utmost challenge to translators. However, theMartin Pippin books have beentranslated into Polish, by Hanna Januszewska. The article investigates the linguistic exponents of multimodality in Farjeon’s books and their equivalents in the Polish version. The theoretical framework is the translationshift approach [Vinay and Darbelnet1958/1995] and its later extensions. The conclusion is that Hanna Januszewska’s translation is an almost perfect example of functional equivalence.
Gawronska, Barbara (2023). Szwedzki romantyk zwiedza byłe Pomorze Szwedzkie. Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, zapiski z podróży z roku 1817. A Swedish romantic poet visits the former Swedish Pomerania: P. D. A. Atterbom, travel diary from the year 1817. Wielkie Pomorze. ISSN 2956-3844. p. 131–146. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2022). The World of George Grosz’s Pictures and the World Depicted in The Novel Pokora by Szczepan Twardoch. Polilog. Studia Neofilologiczne. ISSN 2083-5485. 12, p. 153–168. doi: 10.34858/polilog.12.2022.374. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
“My drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment […] I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms” – so stated George Grosz in a refl ection on his art. This quotation expresses the essence of “The New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) – a movement in German art in the time of Weimar Republic. The cover of Szczepan Twardoch’s novel Pokora (2020) is designed on the basis of Grosz’s painting Panorama. Down with Liebknecht (1919). The aim of the article is to explore how the literary text relates to its paratext and epitext, and which verbal pictures in the novel share motifs with Grosz’s visual art. This case study, conducted in the framework of Gérard Genette’s transtextuality theory and later research on intertextuality, shows that associations to Grosz’s pictures and even the artist’s biography are clearly present in Twardoch’s story of a young man from Silesia who is pending between German, Polish, and Silesian identity as well as between social classes, political views, and erotic orientations.
Gawronska, Barbara (2020). Nobelprisen i 2018: Olga Tokarczuk. In Jahr, Ernst Håkon & Thygesen, Ragnar (Ed.), Agder Vitenskapsakademi Årbok 2019. Novus Forlag. ISSN 9788283900507. p. 228–231. Full text in Research Archive
Erdmann, Susan Lynn & Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Norwegian Translations of Anne of Green Gables: Omissions and Textual Manipulations. In Glaz, Adam (Eds.), Languages, Cultures, Worldviews; Focus on Translation. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783030285081. p. 349–366. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-28509-8_14. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Cultural References and Linguistic Exponents of Gender in the Norwegian Translation of Michał Witkowski’s Lubiewo. In Glaz, Adam (Eds.), Languages, Cultures, Worldviews; Focus on Translation. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783030285081. p. 367–392. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
The novel Lubiewo by the Polish writer Michał Witkowski (2004), awarded the prestigious NIKE prize, has been often referred to as a “homosexual Decamerone”. The burlesque and sometimes tragicomic story about the world of Polish homosexuals is deeply anchored in the reality of the communist regime and the time of the political system change after 1989; in addition, the narrators use different variants of Polish “camp-talk”. Thus, the book is very challenging as source text (ST) in translation, yet it has been translated into around 20 languages. Translation difficulties posed by Witkowski’s text and the strategies applied by different translators have been discussed by Gawrońska Pettersson (2011 – German and Swedish), Król (2016 – English and French), Szafraniec (2014 – Slovenian), Szymił (2014 – English), and the translator into English, William Martin (Witkowski 2010). In this study, the analysis will focus on the Norwegian version of Lubiewo – Skrullestranda, translated from Polish by Agnes Banach and published by Forlaget Oktober in 2015. Some aspects of the Norwegian translation will be compared to other Germanic versions of the novel (English, German, and – marginally – Swedish).
Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Kinderland ist abgebrannt. In Kalinowski, Daniel (Eds.), Wielkie Pomorze. Wojna i Pokój/Great Pomerania. War and Peace.. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pomorskiej. ISSN 9788365826220. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Romantyzm, realizm i dylematy tłumacza w świecie fantastyki i grozy. Polilog. Studia Neofilologiczne. ISSN 2083-5485. p. 159–180. doi: 10.34858/polilog.9.2019.302. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Nobelprisen i litteratur 2018: Olga Tokarczuk. In Jahr, Ernst Håkon & Thygesen, Ragnar (Ed.), Agder Vitenskapsakademi Årbok 2019. Novus Forlag. ISSN 9788283900507. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Cultural References and Linguistic Exponents of Gender in Michal Witkowski's Lubiewo. In Glaz, Adam (Eds.), Languages, Cultures, Worldviews; Focus on Translation. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783030285081. p. 367–392. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-28509-8_15. Full text in Research Archive
Erdmann, Susan Lynn & Gawronska, Barbara (2016). Being at home: Global citizenship in Norwegian schools. A study of children’s poems. LingBaW. Linguistics Beyond and Within. 2, p. 61–76. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2013). Nordiska medeltidsballader i informationsteknologins tidsålder. Acta Sueco-Polonica. ISSN 1104-3431. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2009). Novelty Extraction from Special and Parallel Corpora, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer. p. 291–302. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
How can corpora assist translators in ways in which resources like translation memories or term databases cannot? Our tests on English, Polish and Swedish parts of the JRC-Acquis Multilingual Parallel show that corpora can provide support for term standardization and variation, and, most importantly, for tracing novel expressions. A corpus tool with an explicit dictionary representation is particularly suitable for the last task. Culler is a tool which allows one to select expressions with words absent from its dictionary. Even if the extracted material may be stained with some noise, it has an undeniable value for translators and lexicographers. The quality of extraction depends in a rather obvious way on the dictionary and text processing but also on the query.

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Gawronska, Barbara (2019). Nobelprisen i litteratur 2018: Olga Tokarczuk. Full text in Research Archive
Erdmann, Susan Lynn & Gawronska, Barbara (2015). Global citizenship in English; the use of English-medium instruction in a Norwegian international school. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2009). Discourse Disfluencies in Bilingual Court Hearings. Comparative Legilinguistics - International Journal for Legal Communication. ISSN 2080-5926. 1(1), p. 60–72. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
In about 9% civil and criminal cases that are settled in Swedish District courts every year, i.e. in roughly 10 000 court hearings, an interpreter is employed when at least one of the involved parties speaks another language than Swedish. In this paper, aspects of interpretation in the courtroom are discussed in general, and examples from court proceedings are used to analyse disfl uent situations. Th e role of the interpreter is viewed, and compared to that of other participants? in the discourse. Aspects of legal rights for the individual are discussed in relation to examples from other language communities. The results show that the confusing situations and misinterpretations are not only dependent on the decisions made by the interpreter. The attitudes and the linguistic behaviour of all discourse participants may contribute to the disfluencies.
Gawronska, Barbara (2008). Lexicalization of Natural Actions and Cross-Linguistic Stability. Full text in Research Archive
Gawronska, Barbara (2008). Natural Language Processing in Information. Full text in Research Archive

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Published Oct. 1, 2026 5:53 AM - Last modified Oct. 1, 2026 5:53 AM