General Translation Portuguese_English

Code:

LA036

Acronym:

TGPI

Keywords
Classification	Keyword
OFICIAL	Language Sciences

Instance: 2010/2011 - 2S

Active?	Yes
Web Page:	http://web.letras.up.pt/egalvao
Responsible unit:	Department of Anglo-American Studies
Course/CS Responsible:	Bachelor in Applied Languages

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
LA	28	Study Plan-Applied Languages: Translation	3	-	6	52	162

Teaching language

English

Objectives

•To practise deverbalisation through a variety of exercises (note-taking, oral and written summarising, etc.);

•To practise analysing source texts from a translator’s point of view;

•To introduce students to the various strategies used by professional translators to overcome difficulties at word, sentence and text level;

•To facilitate genre literacy by practising text production of specific text types in the target language;

•To familiarise students with the multiple translation resources available on the Internet and help students separate the wheat from the chaff;

•To familiarise students with writing conventions in the target language.

Program

We learn mainly by doing, so we learn to translate mainly by translating. We also learn by reading about translation, analysing other people’s translations, discussing the problems, difficulties, and solutions we encounter when we translate, and by sharing the joys and frustrations of our activity as future language mediation experts. This is why our course is best described as a TRANSLATION WORKSHOP. We shall become familiar with various translation approaches and procedures and focus on different areas such as context and register, language functions and text types, as well as source text and target text objectives and audiences. We will also deal with specific terminology, as well as with collocations, false friends, idioms, and culture-bound terms. Keep in mind that this is a SKILLS COURSE, where we start to become acquainted with some of the multiple tools required of a translator today.

The underlying philosophy of our class can be best described as follows:
Our class is a learner-centred environment, so we have to work together to create that kind of environment. This means that: “The teacher is not the source of all knowledge, but a facilitator of students’ learning experiences, and a learner along with the students. The students are not passive recipients of knowledge or know-how but its active generators, and thus teachers along with the teacher. People learn best not by listening passively and memorizing what they hear but by doing things, actively participating in a process. This hands-on pedagogy lies behind the practical translation seminar: if you learn to translate best by translating, then the best way to teach students how to translate is to give them texts and have them translate them into another language. Theorizing translation is more important for the translation student than theories of translation as static objects to be studied and learned. Students should become increasingly comfortable thinking complexly about what they do, both in order to improve their problem-solving skills and in order to defend their translational decisions to agencies or clients or editors who criticize them.”
from: ROBINSON, Douglas. Becoming A Translator. London: Routledge, 1997 (pp. 265 and 275).

Students, divided into ‘translation companies’, will work on authentic translation jobs, whose nature will largely depend on the teacher’s contacts with various Portuguese institutions. In the past, group projects included the translation of the FLUP website, the FENACERCI website, the FLUP Portuguese Utopias website, and a Career Choice Questionnaire. Groups will also be encouraged to work on specialised themes and/or text types, with the aid of small comparable Portuguese and English corpora built with Corpógrafo (www.linguateca.pt). Here are some of the topics selected by students in the past: microbiology (bacteria), stigma and mental health, endometrial cancer, the Visionarium website, psychological tests, social phobia, energy from landfill gas, gastronomy (e.g., recipes from Portuguese-speaking

Mandatory literature

BAKER, Mona; In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, London and New York: Routledge, 1992
NORD, Christiane; Translating as a Purposeful Activity, Manchester: St.Jerome Publishing, 1997. ISBN: 1-900650-02-9
ROBINSON, Douglas; Becoming A Translator: An Accelerated Course, London and New York: Routledge, 1997
HATIM, Basil and Jeremy MUNDAY; Translation. An Advanced Resource Book, London and New York: Routledge, 2004

Teaching methods and learning activities

All the members of our small discourse community will take an active part in the joint process of enquiry, asking questions, giving and taking ideas, opinions, and reasons for translation choices. Remember that having an inquisitive mind is the first step to learning successfully and is a prerequisite for a life-long learning activity such as translating.
Students will be divided into groups of 3 or 4 and will form their own Translation Companies. Each company will be responsible for:

•creating their own image (through a webpage and Power Point presentations);

•deciding on each partner’s specific responsibilities (project management, translation, revision, overall quality control, etc.);

•managing each translation job in a professional way (from answering requests for quotation and planning the project to delivering the final product and invoicing the client);

Feedback will be provided on each job, which will have to be revised following the comments and suggestions received.

Software

All classes will take place in a computer room, where each student will work at a computer using a variety of software and the Internet

Evaluation Type

Distributed evaluation without final exam

Assessment Components

Description	Type	Time (hours)	Weight (%)	End date
Attendance (estimated)	Participação presencial	60,00
Midterm test	Exame	2,00		2011-03-31
Final Test	Exame	2,00		2011-06-03
Transalation Practice	Trabalho escrito	62,00		2011-06-03
	Total:	-	0,00

Amount of time allocated to each course unit

Description	Type	Time (hours)	End date
Study time	Estudo autónomo	36	2011-06-03
	Total:	36,00

Eligibility for exams

ATTENDANCE POLICY
Students are expected to attend 75% of classes and complete all homework and classwork.

Calculation formula of final grade

The final grade will be an average of the results obtained for translation company work (group work) and in the final test. The exact weighting of each of these components will be announced at the beginning of the semester.

Examinations or Special Assignments

Not applicable.

Special assessment (TE, DA, ...)

Applicable to working students. Working students can opt for the following type of assessment: an extended translation assignment (to be agreed upon with the teacher at the beginning of the semester); and a test to be taken at the end of the semester. Each will be worth 50% of their final grade.

Classification improvement

Students wishing to improve their grade will have to repeat one of the assessment components.

Observations

Language of instruction: English.

Translating from Portuguese into English
Although the direction of translation has been traditionally assumed to be into the translator’s mother tongue, it is by now widely recognized that translations from languages of limited diffusion into major languages, such as English, often have to be carried out by non-native English translators. Moreover, “English has long since left the ownership of the native speakers in England, and has become, as Henry Widdowson has described it, ‘world property’” (Snell-Hornby, 2000*). Many authors (among whom Cay Dollerup and Mary Snell-Hornby) have repeatedly pointed out that English has become, volens nolens, the international lingua franca; that translations into English are very frequently meant to reach audiences made up mostly of non-native speakers of this language; and that, as a consequence, it is rather unrealistic, if not even arrogant (Stewart, 2000**), to insist on the somewhat old-fashioned notion that translators should translate only and exclusively into their mother tongue (a concept which is undergoing drastic changes in our increasingly globalised world). In Portugal, for instance (and although Portuguese is among the top ten languages in the world in terms of number of speakers) many years of experience with translation trainees have demonstrated very clearly that a large number of employers tend to assume that translation students must be able to translate from and into the foreign language. For this reason, the texts chosen for this class (for individual and group projects as well as for homework) will be selected from areas which a translator may realistically be confronted with on the Portuguese market – the Internet, business, tourism, international conferences, exhibitions, etc. The following is a list of potential text-types: websites, abstracts; brochures and catalogues (tourist, commercial, institutional); academic papers; research projects; conference programmes, etc.
*Snell-Hornby, Mary. “’McLanguage’: the identity of English as an issue in translation today” in M. Grosman, M., Kadric, I. Kovačič, M. Snell-Hornby (eds.). Translation into Non-Mother Tongues. In Professional Practice and Training. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000.
**Stewart, Dominic. “Conventionality, Creativity and Translated Text: The Implications of Electronic Corpora in Translation.” in Olohan, Maeve (ed.). Intercultural Faultlines. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2000.