The course is designed to prepare students for the translation of journalistic texts (mainly from German into English) with appropriate lexico-syntactic means. It consists of three main parts.
(1) Introductory lectures will focus our attention on key terms in translation (e.g. source and target text, equivalence, text type, interference, culture) as well as aids to translation (monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, collocation dictionaries, thesauri, model texts).
(2) Practical translation exercises aim at making students aware of key differences between English and German texts. We will practise, among other issues, the translation of the German 'Konjunktiv' / reported speech constructions as a main characteristic of journalistic texts, of proper names and titles, of polyfunctionally used verbs such as sollen and lassen, and of impersonal constructions. The translator's false friends will be discussed as well as grammatical and stylistic means to feature special elements in the English sentence. We will also devote our attention to additions and omissions required due to cultural differences.
(3) In a translation workshop students will be given the opportunity of further developing their translation skills on the basis of individual assignments.
- Trainer DS: Bradley Schmidt