Teaching Translation

Programs, courses, pedagogies

LAWRENCE VENUTI

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138654600
• eBook ISBN: 9781317225096
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the past half century, translation studies has emerged decisively as an academic field around the world, and in recent years the number of academic institutions offering instruction in translation has risen along with an increased demand for translators, interpreters and translator trainers. Teaching Translation is the most comprehensive and theoretically informed overview of current translation teaching. Contributions from leading figures in translation studies are preceded by a substantial introduction by Lawrence Venuti, in which he presents a view of translation as the ultimate humanistic task – an interpretive act that varies the form, meaning, and effect of the source text. 26 incisive chapters are divided into four parts, covering:

• certificate and degree programs
• teaching translation practices
• studying translation theory, history, and practice
• surveys of translation pedagogies and key textbooks

The chapters describe long-standing programs and courses in the US, Canada, the UK, and Spain, and each one presents an exemplary model for teaching that can be replicated or adapted in other institutions. Each contributor responds to fundamental questions at the core of any translation course – for example, how is translation defined? What qualifies students for admission to the course? What impact does the institutional site have upon the course or pedagogy?

Teaching Translation will be relevant for all those working and teaching in the areas of translation and translation studies. Additional resources for Translation and Interpreting Studies are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal.

Part I Certificate and Degree Programs

1 An Undergraduate Certificate in Translation Studies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315623139-1

Ben Van Wyke

The Program

The undergraduate certificate in translation studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), is housed in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. It is offered primarily in French, German, Spanish, and American Sign Language, although students can arrange independently to work with other languages taught in the department such as Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. The program emphasizes the intersection between theory and practice as the key factor in educating effective and responsible translators. The certificate helps students to overcome age-old clichés about translation that novices often bring to the classroom_ they come to question the notion that translation is a mechanical task and see it instead as an intellectual activity requiring reflection, research, and meticulous writing skills.

Most certificate students come from the School of Liberal Arts, primarily from the Department of World Languages and Cultures, English, and the Latino Studies Program. Others come from the Schools of Engineering, Law, Medicine, and Science. To be eligible, students must be at least sophomores in good academic standing and have completed two English writing courses, one in elementary composition, the other in argumentative writing, as well as an introductory-level composition course in their source language. Prior to admission, students must demonstrate a minimum level of bilingual skills by successfully completing the introductory translation workshop, one of the required courses for the certificate.

Once admitted, students are required to take nine courses distributed over three categories: core, translation, and a final project. The core includes advanced professional writing (business, administrative, creative, or editing), advanced grammar or linguistics in the source language, and an upper-level course in the source culture. The courses in translation include an introduction to translation studies and interpreting, two translation workshops (introductory and advanced), an introduction to computers and translation, and a course in terminology that is not only specific to a source language but to a field (business, medicine, or law). After fulfilling these requirements, students demonstrate their translation competence by completing a substantial project, which may be either a sixty-hour internship or an independent study in which they produce a translation. Every course involving translation or interpreting requires students to write reflective essays that evolve progressively in length and scope, building on material from previous courses.

The Workshops

Most students gain their first exposure to translation through the introductory workshop, which enables them to discover whether they are truly interested in this practical application of their language skills to continue with the certificate. The translation workshops use real-life texts that are selected to raise important theoretical and practical concerns and to stimulate class discussion. Students learn that texts can be translated in multiple ways, that translating means active participation in creating new texts, and that translators need to be able to defend the choices they make. A wide gamut of text types is covered, from medical and legal texts to journalism and literature. Students translate mostly into their native tongue, although occasionally into their source language as well, since they can learn a great deal when required to translate bi-directionally. Translations are done in and out of class, assignments are put through revisions, and students submit half-page to page-long commentaries that discuss their translation process, strategies, difficult problems, and the solutions they developed. In-class activities allow them to draw on each other’s creative energy by working in groups, translating catchy advertisement slogans, for example, or rhyming children’s literature.

Students’ written commentaries on their work raise theoretical issues that are addressed partly in readings. With Spanish translators, Kelly Washbourne’s manual (2010a) is quite useful since it offers an undogmatic engagement with translation theory that is helpful to instructors as well as students and can be assigned in both the introductory and advanced workshops. Readings in Washbourne are paired directly with translation assignments. The students’ exposure to theory, however, comes mostly from class discussions regarding the texts they translate. Guided by the instructor, students tackle such issues as how to handle culture-specific references, how to translate seemingly untranslatable source texts, how to translate for particular target audiences, and how to address asymmetrical power relations in language pairs. Classes focus heavily on effectively utilizing research tools from both traditional and online sources (monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, web forums such as ProZ.com, corpuses like Linguee.com, and search engines like Google) while stressing their benefits and limitations and the importance of employing them together.

Interpreting is also introduced in the workshops. After translating a medical text, students learn about interpreting norms and practice consecutive interpreting in a medical context with a group of three students switching roles among interpreter, doctor, and patient. A similar exercise is performed after translating a legal text with a situation that involves an interpreter, a lawyer, and a client. Students interested in continuing their work with interpreting later take the courses in field-specific terminologies and medical interpreting.

The most challenging and rewarding activity in both workshops is the service learning component, particularly in the Spanish courses. Since many nonprofit organizations increasingly deal with Spanish-speaking clients, the demand for translators is great, and productive working relationships can easily be established with community partners. Students have translated brochures, forms, and webpages for a local food bank, a women’s shelter, a fire department, an autism awareness association, the YMCA, a cancer support group, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and a transportation agency for seniors.

This work is collaborative. Students are divided into groups and assigned a section of a document to be translated, although they must each draft a complete version of the section before the group meets to decide on the translation to send to the class for editing. The class then discusses each group’s translation, considering the function of the document, the target audience, and the impact of these factors on their verbal choices. After each group revises their text, a representative from the community partner visits the class, and students learn more about the organization, seek answers for pending questions, and practice client education. As the experts in the target language and culture, students, much to their surprise, often enlighten the community partner about its audience or constituency. They also realize that access to a client who is presumably familiar with the operation does not solve all of their translation problems, and they must still make their own decisions. They learn that translation is an interpretive act based on the translator’s assessment of the source text in relation to the context where it will circulate. They write an essay in the form of a report to the organization that sponsored the project, detailing their approach, highlighting problems (e.g. a confusing or poorly written source text, technical terms and names of official programs, cultural elements that are particularly difficult to convey) and describing solutions with the help of the theoretical concepts they have encountered. Students tend to find the service learning projects the most enriching activities of the course because of the sustained work they do and their awareness that the translation will be published and used in the community.

In evaluating student translations, the greatest emphasis is placed on the interrelationship between accuracy and the functional coherence of their writing in the target text. Accuracy is assessed on the basis of their comprehension of the source text and the manner in which they effectively construct a linguistically coherent translation that can function according to the aim of the assignment. Here students’ reflections become key documents: they form the site where students provide a rationale for their choices, including any that deviate from the instructor’s notion of an ideal translation. The reflections allow students to enact the kind of exchange they might have with clients regarding their work. In the classroom setting, the instructor assumes the role of the client, although one who is likely to be more generous to students’ opinions than the clients they might encounter in the professional world and with whom they can negotiate their choices. In the end, the expectation is that students will produce translations that are not only meticulously written texts but also usable in relation to the function they are intended to perform.

Courses in Translation Studies

The workshops complicate the novice’s simplified vision of translation, although primarily through translation practice. The introduction to translation studies and interpreting, in contrast, uses critical reading and writing to focus directly on issues that have dominated Western translation discourse for two millennia. With readings from various anthologies (Gambier and van Doorslaer 2010; Robinson 1997b; Venuti 2012b), the course surveys theory from antiquity to the present, and students learn various approaches to the study and practice of translation while critiquing traditional views about equivalence, authorial intention, and the secondary status of translation. Emphasis is placed on acquiring the ability to synthesize the readings in clear, coherent writing. In weekly assignments students select a passage from the readings and expound upon it for a half-page to a page, ideally relating it to other readings. They then revise and expand three of these assignments.

The course begins with material that does not seem to be overtly about translation: videos of United States Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer who have expressed different opinions about how the United States Constitution should be interpreted. If constitutional scholars on the highest court, we ask, are reading the same document in the same language, how could they be at such odds regarding its meaning? How can we expect translation between languages to communicate a clear, univocal meaning when it does not seem possible in just one language?

Because the Bible has been so important for the formation of Western thinking about translation, we first consider readings by and about Bible translators in different periods, providing a range of views regarding the treatment of sacred texts. These readings include accounts of the Septuagint (Aristeas and Philo Judaeus), defenses of translation practices (Jerome and Martin Luther), commentary on biblical poetics (Meschonnic 2003), as well as prefaces to modern translations such as the New American Bible (1970). Since these readings are all concerned with maintaining a certain equivalence to the source text, they are useful in demonstrating that translation is simultaneously and inextricably linguistic and cultural, so that any meaning to be found in the Bible is necessarily historically and culturally bound.

We also consider authors’ differing opinions regarding their relationship to those who recreate their texts in other languages (e.g. Cunningham 2010; Kundera 1992). A productive conversation emerges among these views as students examine the consecration of authorship in our culture, the hierarchy established between authorial originality and derivative works like translations, the sometimes unreasonable and rather naïve demands that certain authors make on translators, and the extent to which these demands, as well as the cultural and legal conditions on which they rest, can be negotiated.

The controversial issue of how much the source text should be assimilated to the receiving culture is given due attention. Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt’s advocacy of assimilation is juxtaposed to German Romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who championed translation that accommodates the source text. Students read contemporary scholarship on domestication and foreignization that has developed and redefined these terms (Venuti 1995: 1–32). To provide a metaphor to imagine these viewpoints, the class considers contemporary press that provides very different ideas about how immigrants should be translated or assimilated into United States culture. Students immediately connect the theoretical arguments to a range of related and timely questions. Should immigrants maintain a certain foreignness? Is there any validity to the common expectation that immigrants assimilate into a host culture actually composed of a myriad of diverse cultural identities despite the dominance of one? How is the polyglossia of the United States obscured by a hierarchy of languages that privileges a standard dialect?

These questions lead to an exploration of the late twentieth-century shift away from essentialist views of translation to an explicit questioning of the stability of meaning that characterizes most of the texts discussed early in the course. Students consider the emergence of new thinking that foregrounds the power dynamics pervading language and translation. Assigned readings include feminist approaches that expose and search for alternatives to the patriarchal structures embedded in translation theories and practices (Chamberlain 1988; Simon 1996; von Flotow 2010) and postcolonial approaches that scrutinize and challenge the hierarchical relations that have existed between cultures and languages (Bandia 2010; Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Merrill 2013).

The professions of translation and interpreting are never far away from the discussions as students want tangible examples of how these broader theoretical concepts matter for actual translation practice. To understand expectations from professional organizations, codes of ethics such as those by the American Translators Association are read with contemporary accounts of interpreting (Chen 2006; Pöchhacker 2010; Wadensjö 2009) as well as critiques that complicate the sometimes utopian or unrealistic expectations contained in these codes (Apter 2009; Arrojo 2005 and 2012).

As computer-assisted tools are now essential in the translation profession, students are required to take a course that introduces them to the uses, applications, and evaluation of translation technologies. This course covers translation memory systems (primarily Wordfast and Trados), terminology management, and the practice of creating digital glossaries. Assignments ask students to compare translations from automatic programs such as Google Translate, Systran, and BabelFish and identify what the computers have done well and where they are lacking in the human knowledge that can produce a usable translation. Because of the variety of languages among students, they usually select their own texts within specific parameters from their source language and translate them into English. The course also provides an introduction to localization and internationalization, especially the adaptation of websites to other linguistic and cultural environments. Additionally, students must become proficient with a variety of other computer programs (electronic dictionaries, concordancers) that are important for professional translators today and effectively use them in project management and workflow.

The courses in terminology were developed to equip students with a strong background in specific fields that interest them. The main course offerings focus on medicine, law, and business. In all three courses, students are required to shadow an approved professional in the field for six hours. Many of the students who take the course in medical terminology, for example, observe the work of professional medical interpreters at a local hospital. Students who take the course in legal terminology typically observe interpreters in the state courthouse. The contact personnel play an integral role by explaining, often as they move from one patient or case to another, the ins and outs of the field and by answering questions about the processes students have witnessed. Students who take the course in business terminology may observe a bilingual employee of a company that has international accounts. If Spanish is the students’ source language, they may also attend a meeting of the local Spanish chamber of commerce.

The course in medical terminology begins with anatomical terms and moves to systems, illnesses and diseases, and medications. Vocabulary is learned not by memorizing lists but by reading medical texts in which students are required to research specific words. Using bilingual medical dictionaries, they must build their own glossaries. In addition, special modules address medical specialties like pediatrics or general tasks like taking medical histories in both source and target languages. Students who plan on pursuing a career as interpreters in health care are encouraged to register for the course in medical interpreting after studying terminology. Here they receive intensive interpreting practice. The textbook is Holly Mikkelson’s class manual (1994), which provides exercises for training medical interpreters.

The course in legal terminology begins with a module that presents an anatomy of the legal system. Students must become familiar with the court room, distinguishing between and identifying the duties of judges, bailiffs, clerks, prosecutors, and public defenders. At the end of the course, students are given a topic and must give a ten-minute presentation to the class, proposing pertinent questions for discussion that often appear on the final exam.

The course in business terminology requires students to complete two participatory projects. Students who work with Spanish, for example, must visit a Spanish-speaking business such as a market and write up an observation r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Translation, Interpretation, and the Humanities
• PART I Certificate and Degree Programs
• PART II Teaching Translation Practices
• PART III Studying Translation Theory, History, and Practice
• PART IV Resources
• Bibliography
• Index