The Challenge of Translation: A Workshop

Required resources:
Texts will be chosen based on languages students know. See the bibliography for background reading.

Goals for the semester:
We will study how translation works, and how it doesn't. Readings will focus on lyric poetry from a variety of cultures, traditions, and languages. We will examine how much difference there can be between versions of the same text, depending on the translators' goals, abilities, and intended audience. You'll write comparisons of different versions of the same poem and even get to do some translation of your own. We will also look at news items, film subtitles, and other places where translation affects your daily life, and we will have a brief unit on the problems of automatic machine translation.

Workload and grading:
You will write a short essay (roughly 300-500 words) or a translation exercise every week, and you will read translations as well as articles about translation. There will be no exams. Your final project will be either a translation of a substantial text or an extended analysis and evaluation of a group of existing translations.

Grades will be computed as follows:

General policies:
The final project is due in the last class. Short written assignments are due in class the week after they are assigned. Late papers will not be accepted. If you will not be in class on the day when an assignment is due, email it to me, in plain text format (rather than a proprietary word-processor format), to arrive by the end of class.
You should complete the reading assigned for each class before that day's class. You will probably want to bring your notes on the readings to class.

Attendance in class is required, because this is a workshop in which students will discuss and respond to each other's work. On the other hand, if you must occasionally miss class for a legitimate reason, I will assume you can keep up with the work.

I am happy to read drafts of papers as you work on them, or to answer questions about assignments. You may not re-write and re-submit assigned papers; the final copy is due on the scheduled due date, and will be graded.

I call your attention to University policy against plagiarism and other forms of cheating.  Please refer to the Bulletin of Tufts University, p. 40-41, for details.

Please note that except in the most extraordinary circumstances, I will not give "incomplete" grades.  As you know, an Incomplete means that you did not complete the work of the course, and it is the policy of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Technology that incomplete work must be completed within six weeks of the beginning of the next semester.

No extra credit work is permitted, and grades in this course are not "curved."

Acknowledgment for some of the ideas in this course goes to Jeffrey Mehlman, Stephen Scully, and Rosanna Warren, of Boston University, and to Elizabeth Vandiver of the University of Maryland.

Topics and reading assignments by class:
Details will be filled in based on students' needs and on the languages you know.

1. 9 September. Introduction and orientation. What is translation? Why is it necessary? What kinds of things are translated, how, by whom, for what audiences? Example: Sappho 1.
2. 16 September. First case study: Catullus's sparrow poems. (poem 2 and poem 3)
3. 23 September. Second case study: Baudelaire, "Au lecteur," "La Beauté," "La Géante," "La Chevelure," "Le Chat" (both poems with this title), "Harmonie du soir," "L'Invitation au voyage," "Les Chats," "Spleen" (Pluviôse irrité contre la ville entière), "Recuillement"
4. 30 September. Introduction to translation theory. "Foreignizing" and "domesticating" translations: the relationship between the source language and the target language. Does the translator have a responsibility as a creator of literature?
   Read:
   • Schulte and Biguenet, "Introduction" (in Theories of Translation)
   • Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translating" (in Biguenet/Schulte, excerpted from "Methoden des Übersetzens")
   • Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (in Biguenet/Schulte, from Illuminations)
   • Ortega y Gasset, "The Misery and the Splendor of Translation" (in Biguenet/Schulte, from "La Miseria y el esplendor de la traducción")
   • Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" (in Biguenet/Schulte or in Brower)
   • Paz, "Translation: Literature and Letters" (in Biguenet/Schulte, excerpted from Traducción: Literatura y Literalidad)
   • Borges, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (in Ficciones)
   • Venuti, "Catullus" (from The Translator's Invisibility, handout)
5. 7 October. Third case study. Project proposal due Spanish lyrics: Lorca, Storni, Neruda.
6. 15 October (Monday schedule). Fourth case study. German lyrics: Goethe, Rilke.
7. 21 October. Fifth case study. Medieval lyrics in various languages.
8. 28 October. Changing fashions in literary translation: historical survey of translations of a single text into English. (Choices may include Cervantes' Don Quijote, Homer's Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Commedia Divina, or another text with a long history of English versions.) Project status due
9. 4 November. Translations from English to other languages.
10. 18 November. Non-literary translation: news sources, simultaneous interpretation, film subtitles. Is translating a news article different from translating a poem?
11. 25 November. Project day: brief presentation and extended discussion of your final projects.
12. 2 December. Machine translation. Can't a computer do all this? Why not? What machine translation is good for and what its present limits are.
13. 9 December. Final project due. Review and summary. What is translation?

Selected bibliography:
This bibliography is limited to books in English that are available in Perseus or in Tisch.
Arrowsmith, William, and Roger Shattuck, eds. The Craft and Context of Translation: A Symposium. Austin: 1961. PN241.A74
Biguenet, John, and Rainer Schulte, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: 1992. P306 .T453 1992
Brower, Reuben, ed. On Translation. Cambridge: 1959. PN241 .B7
Carne-Ross, D. S., and Kenneth Haynes, eds. Horace in Translation. London: 1996. PA6394 .A2 1996
Eco, Umberto, translated by Alastair McEwen. Experiences in Translation. Toronto: 2001 PN241.E28 2001
Gass, William. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation. New York: 1999. PT2635.I65 Z72 1999
Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere, eds. Translation, History and Culture. London: 1990 (rpt. New York, 1995). P306.T735 1995
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: 1975. P306.S66
Steiner, George. Homer in English. London and New York: 1996. PA4025.A15 S74 1996
Warren, Rosanna. The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Boston: 1989. PN241.A76 1989

On-line resources
Perseus Digital Library, a humanities library with a particular focus on language tools
Translation in Context, materials for a continuing series of panels at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association. Large bibliography included.
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, a community of scholars working on computer translation
Translator's Home Companion, resources for professional translators