Tanja Collet grew up in Belgium, where she completed her undergraduate studies before coming to Canada. She holds a BA (or licence) in Translation Studies from the University of Antwerp (Institut supérieur de traducteurs et interprètes - ISTI/Hoger Instituut voor Vertalers en Tolken - HIVT), as well as an MA in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Linguistics from the Université de Montréal. She completed a postdoctorate in French Applied Linguistics at the Université d’Ottawa, and joined the French Studies Program at the University of Windsor in 2001 where she is currently Associate Professor and Department Head.
Collet teaches courses in the fields of theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, and translation studies. In 2003, she was nominated for the University of Windsor Student’s Alliance (UWSA) Teacher of the Year Award, and in 2023 she was the recipient of the Student Society of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHSS) Outstanding Professor of Humanities Award.
Collet’s primary research interests lie in the fields of discourse analysis, text linguistics, specialized discourse (academic and political), and the lexicon. For the past few years, she has been working on two distinct projects: one in the area of text linguistics which studies the semantic and terminological dimensions of citation use in academic discourse, and another one in the area of discourse analysis, which focuses on the language attitudes and writings, both private (diaries and letters) and public (newspaper articles and other published works), of the Flemish and Dutch-speaking immigrant communities of southwestern Ontario. Her work has appeared in European and North American journals, such as Discourse & Society, Discourse and Interaction, JosTrans, Linguistica Antverpiensia NS, Meta, and TTR (Études sur le texte et ses transformations). She has served on the editorial board of Meta: Journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal (Presses de l’Université de Montréal), and is the current editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies (CJNS). Her research has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), from the Taalunie (Dutch Language Union; an international regulatory body headquartered in The Hague and Brussels), and from the University of Windsor’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. In 2012, she was awarded the Vinay & Darbelnet Prize by the Canadian Association for Translation Studies (CATS) for her research contributions in the area of text linguistics.
Selected publications
Collet, Tanja. 2023. Wartime propaganda in the Gazette van Detroit (1914-1918). Dutch Crossings. Journal of Low Countries Studies 47(3): 226-247.
Collet, Tanja (ed.). 2022. CAANS 2022 Conference Proceedings. Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 42(2).
Collet, Tanja (ed.). 2021. CAANS 2021 Conference Proceedings. Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 41(2).
Collet, Tanja. 2021. La citation comme source de renseignements métalangagiers dans l’article scientifique. Meta 66(2) : 382-405.
Collet, Tanja. 2018. Meaning negotiation in academic discourse: A typology of citations as semantic markers. Discourse and Interaction 11(2): 5-25.
Collet, Tanja. 2018. The war diary (1914-1919) of Father Ladislas Segers: Patriotism, Flemish nationalism and Catholicism. Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 38: 47-58.
Collet, Tanja. 2016. Intertextuality in specialised translation: citations as semantic markers in social science. JoSTrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation 26: 72-95.
Collet, Tanja. 2016. Language controversies in the Gazette van Detroit (1916-1918). In Discord and Consensus in the Low Countries, 1700-2000, edited by Jane Fenoulhet, Gerdi Quist & Ulrich Tiedau, 81-101. London: University College London Press.
Collet, Tanja. 2014. Obstacles lexico-sémantiques à la lecture réussie d’un texte de spécialité. TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction) 27(1) : 123-148.
Collet, Tanja. 2011. Semantic hurdles to the successful reading of a specialised text. In La investigacion y la ensenanza aplicadas a las lenguas de especialidad y a la tecnologia. Proceedings of the 10th AELFE (European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes) Conference, edited by Maria Luisa Carrio et al., 43-51, Valencia: Universitat Politècnica de València.
Collet, Tanja. 2009. ‘Civilization’ and ‘civilized’ in post-9/11 US presidential speeches. Discourse & Society 20(4): 455-475.
Collet, Tanja. 2007. Une approche lexicographique ou terminologique pour la description de la variabilité du terme ? La banque des mots (Conseil international de la langue française) 74 : 27-40.
Collet, Tanja. 2004. What’s a term? An attempt to define the term within the theoretical framework of text linguistics. Linguistica Antverpiensia NS 3: 99-111.
Collet, Tanja. 2003. A two-level grammar of the reduction processes of French complex terms in discourse. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 9(1): 1-27.