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Translation Studies (ENG -427): Course outline (ENG -427)

Course description

The course introduces some of the major concepts in translation theory and focuses on their application to translation practice. It deals with issues of equivalence, formal properties of texts as objects for analysis at linguistic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels, and emphasises the importance of a functional approach to translation practice and a descriptive and sociological approach to translation research. Students will be provided with a comprehensive overview of the discipline of translation studies, raising their awareness of both the diversity of possible approaches to translation and the relationships between these approaches.

Course contents

Unit I: Main issues of translation studies

  • The concept of translation
  • What is translation studies?
  • An early history of the discipline
  • Developments since Holmes
  • The van Doorslaer ‘map’
  • Discipline, inter discipline or multidiscipline?

Unit II: Translation theory before the twentieth century

  • Word-for-word’ or ‘sense-for-sense’?
  • Early Chinese and Arabic discourse on translation
  • Humanism and the Protestant Reformation
  • Fidelity, spirit and truth
  • Towards contemporary translation theory

Unit III: Equivalence and equivalent effect

  • Roman Jakobson: the nature of linguistic meaning and equivalence
  • Nida and ‘the science of translating’
  • Newmark: semantic and communicative translation
  • Koller: equivalence relations
  • Later developments in equivalence

Unit IV: Studying translation product and process

  • Vinay and Darbelnet’s model
  • Catford and translation ‘shift’
  • Option, markedness and stylistic shift in translation
  • The cognitive process of translation
  • Ways of investigating cognitive processing

Unit V: Functional theories of translation

  • Text type
  • Translatorial action
  • Skopos theory
  • Translation-oriented text analysis

Unit VI: Discourse and Register analysis approaches

  • The Hallidayan model of language and discourse
  • House’s model of translation quality assessment
  • Baker’s text and pragmatic level analysis: a coursebook for translators
  • Hatim and Mason: the levels of context and discourse
  • Criticisms of discourse and Register analysis approaches to translation

Unit IV: Systems theories

  • Polysystem theory
  • Toury and descriptive translation studies
  • Chesterman’s translation norms
  • Other models of descriptive translation studies: Lambert and van Gorp and the Manipulation School

Unit VI: Cultural and ideological turns

  • Translation as rewriting
  • Translation and gender
  • Postcolonial translation theory
  • The ideologies of the theorists
  • Translation, ideology and power in other contexts

Unit IX: The role of the translator: visibility, ethics and sociology

  • The cultural and political agenda of translation
  • The position and positionality of the translator
  • The sociology and historiography of translation
  • The power network of the translation industry
  • The reception and reviewing of translations

Unit X: Philosophical approaches to translation

  • Steiner’s hermeneutic motion
  • Ezra Pound and the energy of language
  • The task of the translator: Walter Benjamin
  • The Deconstruction

Unit XI: New directions from the new media

  • Audiovisual translation
  • Localization, globalization and collaborative translation
  • Corpus-based translation studies

Translation Studies

Textbooks

Course objectives

The objectives of this course are to enable the students:

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  • To acquire a solid understanding of the requirements of a translator.
  • To comprehend the role of a translator as an intercultural mediator according to the functional focus of the study of translation.
  • To formulate the identification of recurring problems in translation
  • To familiarize the student with the professional context of a translator
  • To attain fluency in translation processes, research application, professional conduct as a translator, etc.

Teaching-learning Strategies

Teaching will be done through the lecture method with a combination of tasks/projects and presentations