Rate My Professor Xiaoyu Zhao

Dr. Xiaoyu Zhao serves as an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics within the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Australia. She also holds the position of Research Fellow at the Monash Suzhou Research Institute. Zhao obtained her PhD in Interpreting Studies in 2023 from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where her doctoral thesis, titled 'A multidimensional investigation of cognitive load and performance over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese,' explored the impact of court-specific factors—such as interpreting expertise, prolonged interpreting turns, and input speech rate—on simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance. This work applied Cognitive Load Theory to explain how these variables and their interactions impose cognitive demands on interpreters, particularly in legal settings. Complementing her doctorate, she holds a Master of Translation and Interpreting (Research Stream) from UNSW. As a practicing professional, Zhao is a NAATI-certified Interpreter at the Certified level for English and Mandarin, with hands-on experience in interpreting services across Australia and China.

Zhao's research specializations lie at the intersection of Interpreting Studies, Translation Studies, Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and Quantitative research methods. Her expertise centers on interdisciplinary mixed-method interpreting research, emphasizing quantitative experimental methodologies to investigate performance dynamics in high-stakes environments like courts. She contributes to education by teaching advanced units, including APG5601 Medical and Scientific Translation, delivered online in block mode at Monash's Clayton campus. Key scholarly outputs include the conference abstract 'Temporal dynamics of interpreting performance in domestic and international courts: A comparative analysis' (2024, CIUTI 2024), which examines performance variations across judicial contexts, and 'Toward a refined approach to assessing simultaneous interpreting in courts' (2023 AUSIT National Conference). Her PhD research has been disseminated as a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Through her dual roles in academia and professional practice, Zhao bridges theoretical insights with real-world applications in translation and interpreting.