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Course Description

Summary

Designed to help beginner translators with no experience build their own ethical translation practices—with attention to issues of race, gender, and queerness—this course offers an introduction to translation via a hands-on approach. What pronouns do you use when translating from a language that doesn’t have gendered pronouns? Do you translate slurs? We will tackle these questions, plus the basics, thinking about a work’s tone, audience, and sociohistorical context in order to bring it to life in English.

The course consists of two concurrent threads pursued via a seminar and hands-on workshop portion each week. Because the course is open for anyone interested in translating or in experimenting with translation, the “workshop” includes class activities and assignments that build up gradually from the basics. “Reading” knowledge of a second language is required, which means that you understand enough grammar that you can make out the original with a dictionary. This is pretty basic—usually a couple years of high school language class will suffice.

In the seminar we read essays by practicing translators alongside their translations in order to: a) understand theories and methods of translation, with an eye on race, gender, and queerness; b) read and understand global literature in translation; c) understand how theory can be put into practice, and how practice informs theory. From Emily Wilson’s feminist and race- and class-conscious approach to the classics to Susan Bernofsky on the importance of revision, from John Keene’s theses on translating Blackness to my own reflections on antitrans sentiment in queer Iranian lit, our readings offer concrete ways to translate accurately and responsibly.

The workshop portion of the class helps you build your own literary translation practice from the ground up. Possibilities include groupwork and retranslating published material. Eventually you will choose your own—very short!—text to translate. You may translate from any (preferably written) language but only into English. All literary genre (i.e., poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction) are welcome. Our multilingual, multigenre course method uses this diversity as a strength, rather than a limitation. Working knowledge of a second language is required, but no prior translation experience. 

You need not consider yourself a writer in English to successfully translate; you must simply be committed to the cause. If you like to read and have some second-language skills, you can—and should—translate!