The purpose of this course is to help students develop Chinese-English translation competence. Students will learn to do translation-oriented text analysis that will enable them to justify their translational decisions. Students will gain insights into the differences and similarities between Chinese and English and become familiar with the translation strategies available to professional translators. A variety of topics related to translation studies in general will be introduced, including translation of different genres, the use of technology in translation, multimedia translation and interpreting. In addition to doing translation exercises, students also need to complete an individual project on a translation-related topic of their choice to demonstrate their understanding of the theoretical principles learnt in class.
To ensure the primary focus of the course is more on the development of transfer competence than on linguistic competence, we will only deal with English-to-Chinese translation in the first semester. Chinese-to-English translation will be introduced in the second semester.