Austin Woerner's Memory Palace
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WOC207 Spring 2023 Session 4

Day 3

Tues. Mar. 28

  • Review: genre, style, parallel texts

  • Share experience asking informants about “Ad” poem

  • Discuss Ch-En museum placard translation

  • Intro to translation challenges

Homework:

➤ (ASAP) Sign up for translation Challenge #1

As soon as possible, read the instructions for Challenge #1 carefully, then sign up for the challenge you most want to do by typing your name directly onto the document. Remember that if you translate Chinese into English for Challenge 1, you’ll translate English into Chinese for Challenge 2, and vice versa.

If any challenge ends up with only one student signed up for it, I’ll negotiate with students directly to find one who’s willing to switch to that challenge. (We need to end up with two groups of 2 and two groups of 3.)

Note that if you sign up for Challenge 1A (the first one) I’ve made an advance reservation with a WLS who can serve as an informant, and I will give you that appointment!

➤ (Due Thurs. morning) Translate “ad” into Chinese, read classmates’ translations

Read your classmates’ annotations of “Ad” (the notes about what you learned from your informants) on SharePoint. Then, translate this poem into Chinese by Thursday morning 6am (China time). Submit your translation on Sakai.

As you translate, consider the issue of style and genre. This text belongs to do different genres: poetry and advertising. How will you translate it into Chinese in such a way that it feels like a poem? (And what kind of poem? This is a modern English poem, so you might want to consult examples of modern Chinese poems as parallel texts.) And perhaps most importantly, how will you make the language sound like advertising in Chinese?

On Thursday morning I will anonymize your translations and share them with the class. Once I’ve done that, please read your classmates’ translations and come to Thursday’s class ready to tell us which version is your favorite, and why. Please also be ready to share examples of translations that do a particularly good job of mimicking the style of advertising language in Chinese.

➤ Share examples of Chinese museum placards that could serve as parallel texts

In the folder “Chinese museum placard parallel texts,” please upload an example of a parallel text you consulted for this exercise. If you did not consult a parallel text, find one now and upload it. (A good parallel text for this exercise would be a museum placard originally written in Chinese [not translated] about an ancient artifact.)

➤ Read En-Ch museum placard translations

In our SharePoint folder you’ll find your classmates’ Chinese translations of the English museum placards. Read the five different versions of the placard you did not translate. (If you translated the placard about the sarcophagus, read the translations of the placard about the Seneb statue; if you translated the placard about the Seneb statue, read the translations of the placard about the sarcophagus.)

Ask you read, ask yourself: 1) Which translation is most readable? Which one is least readable? and 2) Which translation’s style is most appropriate for a Chinese museum placard? Which translation’s style is least appropriate?

(PS - Do not look for the original online! In this exercise we don’t care how accurate the translation is, we just care about how effective the Chinese writing is.)

Once you’ve done that, please fill out the Qualtrics survey corresponding to the translations you read (the translations of the placard you didn’t translate yourself.):

➤ READ TWO PIECES OF JOURNALISM AND MAKE OBSERVATIONS

Challenges 1A and 1B are both examples of the genre of journalism. Specifically, they are both feature stories — long-form stories one might find in a magazine (and sometimes in newspapers) that tell an in-depth story, usually about the life experiences of an individual. Like any other text, feature stories follow certain genre conventions and adopt a particular style, and before translating them, your first job is to familiarize yourself with that style.

For next class, please read both of these articles (you can find them in the folder “Challenge 1 texts”) and for each one write five observations (five sentences that begin with the words “I noticed…”) about the style of the language used in the article. Pay attention to things like:

  • How long are the sentences?

  • Are there any particular grammatical structures that appear frequently?

  • Are there particular types of words that appear frequently?

  • How formal or colloquial is the language? What words signal formality / colloquialism?

  • Are there any particular types of words or grammatical structures that don’t ever appear?

Write each set of 5 observations on the same Word document (10 observations total) and upload them to the folder “Observations on journalism style” on SharePoint. (Feel free to write your observations about Chinese journalism style in Chinese, if that feels more natural to you.)

Austin Woerner