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Exploring the Boundless Possibilities of Translation
| Special Topics in Translation: Craft, Practice, Profession is designed as a romp through a wide variety of texts that may be encountered by a professional translator. This is a practice-forward class. We will try our hands at texts both pop-culture and highbrow: from recipes, lyrics, and experimental poetry to computer-generated text. Through frequent short assignments and lively collaborative classroom exercises, we will hone our translation skills, learn to recognize our own stylistic predispositions and idiosyncrasies, and flex our muscles as creative writers. By the end of the course, students will have produced a translation portfolio featuring samples of different kinds of translation work, evaluation, and self-reflection. |
| A few course highlights: |
| • Comparing at translations of the same text: we will read passages from three English versions of 西遊記 translated by Anthony Yu, Arther Waley, and Julia Lovell. |
| • Translating ‘weird’ language: we will explore strategies for translating different examples of non-standard English and Chinese, including experimental writing (that deliberately disregards linguistic convention), second-language writing, machine-translation, and computer-generated text. For example: how might one translate Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (translated into English as A Void), an entire novel written without the letter “e”? |
| • Workshopping a poem as a class: we will work collectively to produce a collaborative translation. |
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