Course overview
This course is to develop students' basic practical skills in translation from Chinese into English. It focuses on developing students' skills in applying knowledge and experience to their understanding, interpretation and production of texts of various genres. The course incorporates theoretical concepts with practice. It introduces different approaches to translation to help students be aware of their own perceptions of translation and translation process. It exposes students to the features and requirements of text production for different genres in both Chinese and English and to translation practice in various areas that is relevant to everyday life, including society, business and trade, law and media. Students also have an opportunity to use computer-based skills and the internet for translation purposes.
Course learning outcomes
- Recognise both simplified and traditional characters for translation purposes.
- Switch between Wade-Giles and Pinyin Romanisation systems for translation purposes.
- Understand the information conveyed in the source text for different contexts/genres.
- Understand the complex social and cultural messages embedded in the source text.
- Express understood meaning in the target language for different contexts/genres.
- Write in appropriate styles, free from grammatical and other errors, and taking into account the linguistic, socio-cultural and other factors associated with the source language text and the target language text.
- Diagnose mistranslation and loss of meaning in translation.
- Articulate/communicate one’s own translation process, including contrastive linguistic analysis involved, choice of vocabulary, problem-solving strategies etc.
- Engage in collaborative work and use the Internet to solve problems encountered in translation.
- Recognise and understand ethical issues in professional and intellectual contexts of translation.