This module aims to provide students with solid training in translating in their chosen language pair. It will focus on translating texts for businesses and organisations, across a range of sectors (e.g. consumer goods, retail, charities and cultural institutions), with particular emphasis on general or technical texts for a general readership (consumers, the public, non-specialist readers). Typical genres covered will be brochures, product descriptions, press releases, instructions and webpages.
Plenary sessions (all students together) introduce key concepts and skills (client interaction, information mining, translating using appropriate strategies, use of corpora and parallel texts and revising/editing/quality assurance. The following tools are introduced: general IT resources, online dictionaries, search engines, termbases, aligned texts and corpus tools. Students are then split into language groups, and classes focus on practical translation work, consolidating topics covered during the plenary sessions.
Students will have the opportunity to practise translation in both directions but will choose one target language for the end-of-module assessment.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
show up-to-date knowledge of the source and target languages and an awareness of differences in their grammatical, lexical and idiomatic structures and formal conventions
demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the responsibilities towards the client and other key players in the translation process
identify and critically analyse appropriate translation strategies and procedures
demonstrate advanced research and translation skills and the ability to apply these skills rapidly and well to the production of a ‘fit for purpose’ translation in the target language
demonstrate competence in the use of a variety of technological translator resources and the ability to apply these resources effectively and rapidly to the production of texts in the target language
