This tutorial is designed to deepen your understanding of texts and to refine your command of both German and English through the practice of translation. Translating is among the most demanding work you can do with your language ability, providing a demanding and rewarding way of attending to meaning, tone, and style. To translate a text is to enter into its structure – its choices, its tensions, and its possibilities. It is one of the most exact ways of understanding what a text says and how it says it.
We will approach translation as both a linguistic discipline and an interpretive art. The focus will be on how translators think: how they weigh competing demands such as accuracy, rhythm, idiom, and voice. Translation is not a mechanical transfer of meaning, but a series of judgments, each of which must be justified in context.
The tutorial will include a range of text types to highlight different aspects of translation:
- Poetry, focusing on precision, tone, and sound
- Prose, emphasizing idiom, register, and narrative rhythm
- Dialogue and screenplay, focusing on voice, subtext, and naturalness of speech
- Kursleiter*in: Gary Lovan