There Is Also A Clear Need Across The Board For The Study Of Translation

By Author: Mike Jones
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As the course was offered in the English department, I (which hereafter refers to Emily) did not mandate a foreign language requirement. Because English majors at the University of Alabama, like many of their counterparts at peer institutions, have a four-semester foreign language requirement, I could have made completion of the departmental requirement a prerequisite. But this would likely have reduced enrollment and, in any case, would not have led to Replica Tag Heuer a classroom of students proficient in the same second language. There are certain tangible advantages to specifying prior language knowledge, but there is also a clear need across the board for the study of translation, perhaps especially for the monolingual student who will read foreign literatures exclusively in translation.

In this pilot course, I found that an advanced command of a foreign language was preferable, but not essential. However, I was delighted to discover that my students had studied and occasionally mastered a broad variety of languages. There were two advanced ...
... students of Japanese, one native German speaker, several students with an advanced command of Spanish or French, a handful who had studied Italian, and two with an advanced command of Latin. English majors are rarely invited to apply their language study to their major; a translation studies course will help bridge that gap and enhance both fields of study. As one student concluded in her final paper, "Overall, I think I have learned more between languages than I ever could in just one language."

I created a course wild (more specifically, a PBwiki, now known as PBworks), a Web forum consisting of a collection of Web pages that is designed to enable anyone with access to it to contribute or Replica Cartier Roadster modify content. I was the administrator for this home-accessible forum—well suited to foster collaborative work and facilitate information sharing among learners. Our wiki, "Found in Translation," allowed every member of the class to post pre-presentation readings, commentary, and links to supplementary course materials, such as translations of Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), with a link to a YouTube video recording of Celan reading his poem in the original German. The wiki provided a forum for students to continue class discussions in an informal manner, and it also hosted class assignments. Technology has fueled globalization worldwide; it is fitting that technology should also facilitate the globalization of English departments.

This course offered many students their first introduction to the study of translation. "I'd read things in translation," one student wrote in an anonymous midterm evaluation, "but never once had I given the slightest attention to the translator's name (let alone considered rereading it in another translation), and had given only the barest consideration to the idea that the work was in fact a translation, and not the original." Each student brought his or her own unique set of assumptions (for instance, Katrina's assumption that faithfulness was every translator's primary goal). The English undergraduate is taught to read between the lines for subtexts and symbols; attending to a text's translated status requires additional angles of approach. At stake is our understanding that behind an English translation, however domesticated, lies a foreign text whose translation is more than a mere transliteration.