Day 7
Tues. Sept. 13
Share revised passages
Introduction to “voice”
Homework:
➤ Due Sunday: Challenge 2 translations!
Don’t forget that your translations for Challenge 2 are due at midnight on Sunday! I would suggest to start coordinating with your teammates to find times to meet and work on your translation. If you can, meet up and start talking about your text!
Just a reminder, these are the group assignments:
Chinese-English (to discuss on Tuesday of next week)
Challenge E, “Translating Modernity” - Chenzhao, Tianhui, Zack
Challenge M, Yan Bing art text - Zoey, Jiaqi, Jon
English-Chinese (to discuss on Thursday of next week)
Challenge P, Donald Trump speech - Simon, Yuzhe, Isaiah
Challenge B, Blue Apron press release and commercials - Shutong, Hester, Jason
➤ PReview Challenge 2 texts, think about “voice” and “function”
Look over the two texts in your native / primary reading language (Challenges E and M for EAP-track students, Challenges P and B for CSL-track students) and think about this question: How important do you think the idea of “voice” will be to the success of the translation of this text? What voice (or voices) are important in this text? How would you describe it/them? Here are some aspects of “voice” you could think about:
Register: How formal or colloquial is the text?
Word choice: What kinds of words are present / not present?
Character / personality: What kind of personality is being projected by the voices in the text? What kind of person is the narrator/author/speaker?
Grammar and sentence length: How long are the sentences, and what kinds of grammatical structures do you tend to see repeated often?
Finally, think about the function of the two texts you’re examining. What are these texts “doing”—why were they written/created? What are they trying to achieve?
➤ Research: Find a text to serve as inspiration
Find a text in the target language of your translation challenge (the language you’re translating into) that could serve as inspiration for your group, either because it belongs to the same genre as the text you’re translating, or because it has a similar voice. (Or both!)
Upload your text to the folder “9-Sample texts for Challenge 2” and be ready to share some observations about the text next class. How is this text similar to the text you’re translating? What aspects of the writing style do you think you and your groupmates could or should imitate?
➤ Supplementary REadings
Lu Xun, “The Real Story of Ah Q” (excerpt) - original Chinese and Julia Lovell’s English translation
Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (from Alice in Wonderland) - original English and Chinese translation by Zhao Yuanren 赵元任
p. 317-320 (last three pages) of “Translating Murakami” by Jay Rubin (one of Murakami’s English translators). This is very relevant to our discoveries this past week about how much the language of the source text needs to be changed for it to be truly readable in the target language.
