FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto Línguas Aplicadas General Translation PORTUGUESE - ENGLISH SPRING SEMESTER 2011.

FLUP - Elena Zagar GalvãoFLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do PortoLínguas Aplicadas

General TranslationPORTUGUESE - ENGLISH

SPRING SEMESTER 2011Tue. 15.30-17.30 Classroom 211Wed. 15:30-17:30 Classroom 211

Teacher:Elena Zagar Galvã[email protected]

Webpage: web.letras.up.pt/egalvao

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 satisfactions and frustrations we feel 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.


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).


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.


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.


BAKER, Mona. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

HATIM, Basil and Jeremy MUNDAY. Translation. An Advanced Resource Book. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

NORD, Christiane. Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Manchester: St.Jerome Publishing, 1997.

ROBINSON, Douglas. Becoming A Translator: An Accelerated Course. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.


Students should regularly consult the Translation Portuguese-English website (web.letras.up.pt/egalvao) for information about the course, homework, useful links, etc.

Students should keep an organized record of all the useful sites they find and share this information with the rest of the class.


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 and presenting their staff and services (through 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.



Group Work: 40%Class+Tutorial participation: 10%Final test: 50%

NB: 75% compulsory attendance (working students should come and talk to me at the beginning of the semester)

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 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.


Please send me an email with the following information (mail to:[email protected])

Brief bio Why translation? What translation? What do you expect from this class?


FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto Línguas Aplicadas General Translation PORTUGUESE - ENGLISH SPRING SEMESTER 2011.

Documents

theories of translation

theorizing translation

translation student

translation workshop

ptegalvao slide

facilitator of students

various translation

practical translation