Revising and Editing Texts
| Keywords |
| Classification |
Keyword |
| OFICIAL |
Linguistics |
Instance: 2018/2019 - 2S
Cycles of Study/Courses
| Acronym |
No. of Students |
Study Plan |
Curricular Years |
Credits UCN |
Credits ECTS |
Contact hours |
Total Time |
| MTSL |
18 |
MTSL - Study Plan |
1 |
- |
3 |
30 |
81 |
Teaching language
Suitable for English-speaking students
Objectives
The objective of this curricular unit is to enable students to gain and train their revising and editing skills of different text types and genres, from a variety of areas.
Learning outcomes and competences
By the end of the semester, the students should be able to:
- analyse and classify texts of various types and genres, in order to identify potential issues and adopt appropriate strategies and resources for the communicative context;
- produce texts for specific purposes in Portuguese and/or other working languages in a variety of text genres, for specific situations, under particular constraints and for specific recipients;
- accurately adapt, restructure, summarise and shorten existing texts or translations in the working languages, orally or in writing, or for another audience, genre or style;
- understand and implement the instructions provided in style guides, 'guidelines' and other manuals supplied by clients, in addition to the regulations on the production of specialised texts;
- check, revise/review and edit original texts and translations in their working languages, considering specific quality standards and objectives;
- pre-edit source material using appropriate pre-editing techniques to improve the quality of machine translation;
- post-edit machine translation output, adjusting post-editing levels and techniques to quality and productivity objectives, while ensuring data security and integrity;
- recognise the possibilities and limitations of revising parameters in professional contexts, by critically approaching language services, and make suggestions for improvement;
- critically assess the comprehensibility of different texts;
- critically assess their own work and that of others, having in mind the emerging industry and market needs, as well as new job opportunities.
Working method
Presencial
Pre-requirements (prior knowledge) and co-requirements (common knowledge)
n/a
Program
- Introduction to the concepts of text types, text genres and plain language.
- Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969).
- Conversational maxims (Grice, 1975).
- Multimodality (Kress, 2010).
- Politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978).
- Information structuring: the relationship between Theme and Rheme, cohesion and coherence (Halliday, 1994) and the Karlsruhe comprehensibility model (Göpferich, 2009).
- Analysis of technical writing, revising and editing manuals and style guides.
- Production, revising, editing and critical analysis of general language texts, specialized texts and translations.
- Pre-editing, post-editing and machine translation.
Mandatory literature
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C.; Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, 1978
Göpferich, S.; Comprehensibility assessment using the Karlsruhe Comprehensibility Concept, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 11, 2009
Grice, P.; “Logic and conversation”, In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and semantics. 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press, 1975
Halliday, M. A. K.;
An introduction to functional grammar
Kress, Gunther;
Multimodality. ISBN: 978-0-415-32061-0
Mossop, Brian;
Revising and editing for translators. ISBN: 1-900650-45-2
Searle, John Rogers, 1932-;
Speech acts. ISBN: 0-521-09626-X
Teaching methods and learning activities
Students are encouraged from the beginning to collect and share texts of disputable quality, in order to subsequently ground their initial negative assessment, based on the knowledge acquired. The work is undertaken along two main lines: in the first one, of a more theoretical nature, students are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the topics included in the programme, based on indendependent reading and on the presentations done in class; in the second one, which is more practical in nature, students are requested to analyse, edit and revise texts. Students are also required to prepare an oral presentation on a topic of their choice related to the programme of the Curricular Unit, as well as to submit a written assignment, in which they are required to apply the principles of editing and revising texts to a text of their own choice.
keywords
Humanities > language sciences
Humanities > language sciences > Linguistics
Evaluation Type
Distributed evaluation without final exam
Assessment Components
| Designation |
Weight (%) |
| Defesa pública de dissertação, de relatório de projeto ou estágio, ou de tese |
30,00 |
| Participação presencial |
30,00 |
| Trabalho escrito |
40,00 |
| Total: |
100,00 |
Amount of time allocated to each course unit
| Designation |
Time (hours) |
| Elaboração de projeto |
15,00 |
| Estudo autónomo |
20,00 |
| Frequência das aulas |
30,00 |
| Trabalho de investigação |
16,00 |
| Total: |
81,00 |
Eligibility for exams
In accordance with the applicable regulations (minimum of attendance to 75% of classes).
Calculation formula of final grade
Active participation in class and group work: 30%
Oral presentation on a topic related to the syllabus: 30%
Written assignment: 40%
Examinations or Special Assignments
n/a
Special assessment (TE, DA, ...)
In accordance with the applicable regulations.
Classification improvement
Students wishing to improve their final grade/repeat their assessment will have to repeat the written assignment.