Day 9
Tues. Feb. 14
Discuss ideas for final translation challenge
Homework:
➤ FIND A TEXT TO SERVE AS INSPIRATION FOR YOUR NEXT CHALLENGE
If you haven’t yet, please do this before next class. I won’t count it late.
For Challenge 2, find a parallel text in the target language (the language you’re translating into). Ideally this should be a text in the same genre, whose style is similar in some way to that of the text you’re translating.
Upload the text to the folder “Sample texts for inspiration” on SharePoint and be ready to tell us why you picked this text and how it might serve as inspiration for you when translating.
➤ Work on finding a text for your final project
Following up on our discussion in class, start doing whatever research you need to do to figure out what text you want to work on for your final project. If you need any help or input from me, please message me! Don’t be shy about this — I expect to do a lot of communicating with students to help them shape projects that will be a good fit for them.
Once you know what you want to do, write a 3-5 sentence scenario for yourself similar to the ones I’ve written for all of our translation challenges so far. Make sure you outline clearly what you imagine the purpose of your translation to be — who might want to read it, why they might want to read it, and in what context it might be read. Upload your scenario in a Word document to the folder “Scenarios for final challenges.”
➤ Read translation of global health article
By 8pm on Wednesday China time (I’ve granted this group an extension) you’ll find the Chinese translation of the Koplan et al. article about global health uploaded to the folder “Challenge 2 texts.” Please read the translation, thinking about the following questions, and come ready to next class ready to share your answers:
Does the style seem appropriate for the genre? Come ready to give an example of a sentence whose seems either particularly appropriate, or particularly inappropriate, for an academic article.
What is the author’s thesis? Can you point to a particular sentence in Chinese that conveys a thesis statement or main point?
Can you follow the author’s argument? (Can you follow their logic from point to point throughout the text?) If there are any points at which you become confused or lose the thread, where are those?
If you do understand the argument, how would you summarize it?
➤ Read my “bouquet of Poetry” and come ready to share some observations
A bouquet of poems
Read the little collection of modern English poems I’ve prepared. You don’t need to spend hours trying to understand them; just read them over and get an overall impression.
Come ready to make some general observations about these poems. What kind of language do they use, generally speaking — how would you describe the style? Are there there particular types of words that you often see, or don’t often see? What makes the language attractive, do you think — what makes it poetic?
Finally, come ready to share an example of an image from one of these poems that you find particularly striking, interesting, or beautiful. Tell us how you understand the image — what you see in your mind.
