Translation Studies Course As A Gateway Course

By Author: Jack
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I conceived the translation studies course as a gateway course, and it is as such that Katrina and I now propose it. Ideally, the study of translation plants seeds of interest that will blossom in related fields of inquiry. This is what we saw at the conclusion of the pilot course. By the time they began their final course projects, students had encountered a wide cross-section of non-English-language literature, from the classical to the contemporary, as well as the history of translation theory from Jerome to Derrida. Because students typically presented on Links Of London Charms writers they admired, their enthusiasm encouraged other students to explore and read, with the result that several final projects grew out of other students' presentations. The study of translation thus sparked interest in new writers, new eras, and new geographies of literature, while also cultivating a renewed interest in canonical writers and works.

Many final projects (for project guidelines see Appendix 2) grew out of class discussions and presentations, such as those that ...
... further researched biblical translations through side-by-side comparisons. Some students, however, sought new directions. A number of students embarked on their own translations; several followed translation methods advocated in course readings, while a few came up with and applied their own philosophies of translation. One student translated a passage from Lucretius five times, each following a different translation strategy. She also included an amusing and quite instructive ex post facto analysis of Links Of London Bracelets a previous translation of the same passage that she had submitted to her Latin professor two years prior. Similarly, another student revisited several translation approaches by undertaking five different translations of the same haiku. Following an earlier presentation on Japanese prosody, this project alerted us to some of the frequent misperceptions that American readers have about the Japanese language as well as the haiku form. One student translated the first chapter of a postmodern Japanese novel, while another tackled some of the issues raised by the subtitling of foreign films, using the notoriously incomplete English subtitles of Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City as an object lesson.

Katrina's final project, "An Illegitimate Afterlife: The 'Right,' Presumed and Privileged, to Translate," explored the interface between ideas of two of the theorists we discussed Benjamin's romantic notion of "chosen translators" and the ideal pursuit of a pure language, and Venuti's grounded discussion of the copyright laws and publishing commissions that shape the modern translating world by exploring the manners in which translation has been regulated and legislated, and those laws and regulations broken.