Sections offered SPRING 2022:
#33535 |
RUSSELL VALENTINO |
MW 11:30 AM–12:45 PM |
WH 106 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
Translation is one of the oldest and most complex forms of cross-cultural communication. By its very nature, translation depends on the nuances of human experience, thought, and emotion in contexts that vary widely both in time and place. Being able to translate means both analyzing cultural, religious, linguistic, artistic, and philosophical expressions in their respective, unique linguistic and cultural contexts, and making them effective in other, altogether different contexts. This course uses materials from literature, religion, philosophy, and more to explore how translation happens, who does it successfully, how it can fail, and what skills one needs to master in order to do it well. We will look at translation in broad context, exploring its different forms (oral, written, technical, artistic). At the same time, we will interrogate the often-overlooked skill of paraphrase (intra-lingual translation) to exercise the capacity of adopting another’s standpoint, a capacity that translation requires one to practice habitually: unlike the usual forms of college-based textual analysis, which frequently require students to discuss a portion of a text as part of an “original” argument, translation does not allow students to skip over the parts that might not accord with whatever argument they might like to make. Translators, if they are to be moral in the practice of their work, must understand everything a text has to say and convey all of it to their listeners or readers – you can’t skip over the things you don’t understand or don’t agree with. This means that translation as a form of communication is double-edged: the resulting message must be effective in the receiving language and culture, but the translator can never stop listening to the source language and the source culture. Translators frequently practice belonging to two or more cultures at once.