Practical Course of Written Translation

Course unit code

Specialization 45.03.02  - Linguistics

Course unit title

Practical Course of Written Translation

Name(s), surname(s) and title of lecturer(s)

Elena Klassen, senior teacher, Department of English Philology

Level of course

Bachelor

Semester

5-6

ECTS credits

3

Working hours

Contact hours

Practical classes

54

Writing and defending a course thesis

18

Independent work

72

Total

144

Work placement

none

Language of instruction

English and Russian

Prerequisites

Upper-Intermediate level of general English

Objectives of the course

 Learning outcomes

 A student’s assessments methods

-To learn to notice the differences between the scope of meaning and collocations for similar vocabulary units in the pair of languages “English-Russian” and master lexical translation techniques;

- to study similar and different grammatical phenomena in Russian and English, and master grammatical translation techniques;

- to master stylistic translation techniques and ways of generating various functional types and registers of target texts.

Formation of professional competences:

-command of the method of comprehensive

text analysis before translation ensuring correct understanding (decoding) of the source utterance;

- command of methods to prepare for actual translation (transcoding) including search for information in dictionaries, various reference books and computer networks;

- command of main ways to achieve equivalence in translation (recoding) and the ability to use various translation techniques;

- the ability to carry out written translation following the norms of lexical, grammatical, syntactic and stylistic equivalence in the target language;

- the ability to use discursive text analysis in translation.

Written translations into and out of the student’s native language made as home assignment or in class

Teaching methods

Giving short information on the theory of translation and practicing this knowledge in exercises, source text analysis, brainstorming, independent written translations with subsequent discussion in class, comparative analysis of existing translations, independent study of theoretical literature.

Course unit content

Title

Contact  hours

Self-study hours

Strategies and units of translation

8

8

 Lexical techniques of  translation (transcription, transliteration, calque, lexical modifications, idiom translation)

18

18

Grammatical techniques of translation (for similar grammatical phenomena, for different grammatical phenomena, on the level of word combinations, on the level of a sentence)

18

18

Stylistic techniques of translation (translation of metaphors, metonymy and irony)

6

6

Poetic translation

4

4

Writing and Defending a course thesis

18

18

Assessment requirements

Student’s skills in this subject will be evaluated by means of written translations made as home assignment and in class.

Assessment criteria

The assessment of the presented works is carried out by the following criteria:

– ability to analyze the source text, identify translation problems and translation techniques capable of solving the problems;

–  lexical, grammatical, syntactic and stylistic equivalence of translation to the source text;

-  handing work over in time.

The composition of final accumulative mark

Final accumulative mark consists of: 

Home-assignments (exercises, literary texts of different genres including poetry, academic, scientific and news articles, formal and informal letters, advertisements, instructions) – 50%, work in class – 30%, attendance – 20%.

Course outline arranged by

Elena Klassen, senior teacher