| PWD: Translation Masterclass |
| DozentIn:M.A., dip. TEFL Robert John Murphy |
| Veranstaltungstyp:Seminar (Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen) |
| Ort:01/114 |
| Semester:SoSe 2024 |
Zeiten:Mo. 12:00 - 14:00 (wöchentlich)
Erster Termin:Montag, 08.04.2024 12:00 - 14:00, Ort: 01/114 |
Beschreibung:Welcome to the course PWD Translation Masterclass. You have chosen to take this class because you have a deep interest in the way words work at the semantic level, how they work in combination with each other, how text is constituted from lexical items and how it takes on syntactic form and “texture”.
You have spent many years of your life learning how to read. But much of this training has been based on what I like to call “literary” reading, that is looking for imagery, trying to understand character types, looking for “meaning” in text, or what an author might be trying to tell you. Sometimes, you might have ventured across what we might conceive of as a “line of perception” into analysing the language itself – we might call this “linguistic” reading –, looking at rhetorical terms such as alliteration or anaphora, but how many more rhetorical terms do you know beyond these two? For most of us leaving formal education, the list is pretty short. And beyond this, how good are you at describing the words of any given text before you? So much meaning in a text actually resides in the way words are arranged in relation to each other – their semantic meaning is enhanced greatly by the place they occupy in the context around them.
This master’s course in English assumes that you have a good-to-very-good grounding in English lexico-grammar and syntax, to the degree that you can describe what is going on linguistically in a text before you. It provides you with a handout called “Table of Terminology” in Studip/documents which you should fill out asap and keep with you during the course for reference. This will enable you to add to your knowledge of or refresh your memory about a whole host of terms that will enable you to talk about words and text more precisely.
Describing language is the basis of understanding it. And understanding language is the basis for translating it into another language. When we read, we tend to merely skim the surface of a text. Our brain takes familiar patterns of words for granted, we rarely truly understand a piece of text. But when we come to translate a text from one language to another, there can be no skimming, no “more-or-less” understanding a phrase or sentence. Everything about a phrase must be understood by the translator, even how it sounds as a word, how it is stressed, what its rhythm is, where it appears in a phrase, what word class it is, and much much more.
It is for this reason that translation is often referred to as the supreme linguistic discipline, combining all your accumulated knowledge of language, words, and pretty much everything else you know about everything – and even beyond that, into the abstract worlds of your imagination and your creativity. How otherwise could anyone transfer the meaning of a text across linguistic and cultural boundaries? It’s a crazy thing even to attempt, if you think about it.
Nevertheless, we are going to give it a try. |
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