92512 - Introduction To Translation And Interpretation

Learning outcomes

The student

• understands the usual expectations placed on professional translators and interpreters in Italy;
• becomes acquainted with the process of initiating and keeping a business relationship to offer multilingual communication services;
• can minimally customize generic digital tools to become more efficient;
• has a working knowledge of basic professional conventions regarding names, numbers, and figurative language;
• knows the main orthotypographic and markup principles and knows how to deal with simple graphics;
• is familiar with specifics of both print and digital formats

Course contents

The course provides an introductory, professional overview of professional translating and interpreting. Although most topics are generic, the course focuses on freelancing, and has some translation-specific topics, although many are common to interpreting.

Course contents are organized into weekly, self-contained topics. Students will be helped to discover language-independent, problematic areas in source texts and discourses, and in the next session will have some hands-on practice on such topics.

Week 1: introduction

(1)

presentation of course contents and goals

the palette of multilectal mediated communication tasks

relationship between ST and TT

text is frozen behavior

(2)

language underspecifies meaning

language and interlinguistic gaps

recontextualization: deictic anchoring, explicitation, implicitation

translations get old

Week 2: the professional translation process

planning

making an estimate

writing an invoice

communicating with the client

Week 3: The translator's workstation

personalizing everyday tools

keyboard shortcuts

searching for information

Week 4: Names

exonyms

transliteration

official names

acronyms

publications

Week 5: Numbers, quantities, magnitudes

rounding up

weights, measures, units

money conversion and conventions

reporting statistics

Evaluation: turn in midterm assignment 1

Week 6: Orthotypography

fonts

page layout

text types and formats

Week 7: Multimodality

handling graphics and maps

translating charts and tables

songs

Evaluation: turn in midterm assignment 2

Week 8: Digital formats

web pages

pdfs

Spreadsheets

Week 9: Figurative language

metaphors

metonymy

rhethorical structure

Week 10: Elements of style

gender

wordiness

clichés

Readings/Bibliography

Brown, Tim. 2018. Flexible typesetting. New York: A Book Apart.

Moya, Virgilio. La traducción de los nombres propios. Madrid: Cátedra.

De Marco, Marcella. 2006. Audiovisual Translation from a Gender Perspective. Jostrans 6: 167–184. Available at https://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_demarco.pdf

Rothstein, Jandos. 2007. Designing magazines. New York: Allworth Press

Typography Handbook. http://typographyhandbook.com/

Butterick's practical typography. https://practicaltypography.com/

Assessment methods

The assessment comprises two midterms activities and two final exams.

Assignment I, midterm I – Submission of a contrastive study of DIT's style sheets: between 1,000 and 1,500 words, worth 25 %

The students are expected to contrast, improve, and enlarge the different style sheets the DIT offers to streamline final papers in undergradutate and graduate levels. This will require the students to think critically about the existing norms elsewhere.

Assignment II, midterm II - Submission of a translation of a magazine article with abundant phenomena of the kinds included in the syllabus (e.g., names, weighs and measurements, metaphors).

The students are expected to turn in the translation of a text between 800 to 1200 words-long. Students will choose their texts, subect to approval by the instructor.

Assignment III, written exam - Submission of a bilingual magazine in pdf format.

Students will turn in a magazine, that may adopt various forms: an airline magazine, a DIT-student magazine, a touristic magazine, and the like. The magazine should cover most topics addressed in the syllabus. Students are advised to seek guidance well in advance and to check their progress with their instructor. This is a collective endeavor, and students will work in groups of 5, with a group leader.

Assignment IV, oral exam - Analysis of a translated text

Students will be expected to carry out a 10 to 15 minutes, individual, oral criticism of a translation, as presented in print form by the instructor.

Office hours

See the website of Ricardo Munoz Martin