Japn 304: Introduction to Translation and Interpretation
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to translating and interpreting that provides an overview of the knowledge necessary for the field of translation and interpretation. Students will study general issues involved in translating and interpreting and the building blocks for the necessary knowledge and techniques including rapid reading, analyzing, summarizing and paraphrasing, listening comprehension, and shadowing. This class will be conducted in Japanese.
MLO's:
This course meets MLO 1, MLO 2, and MLO 4.
Course Narrative:
This course allowed for me to further develop my understanding of Japanese language. I was able to expand my knowledge of Kanji and developed skills necessary to identify a variety of radicals in order to find and understand the Kanji that I do not know. While developing my Kanji skills I was also able to use that skill to read paragraphs more fluidly as well as have a better comprehension while doing so. Through our usage of the textbook for the course, I was able to work on using my comprehension skills to identify the main themes in a text even if I did not understand all of the text that I read. We also worked on scanning and skimming texts so that we could more quickly find the information that we were looking for as well as quickly determine the gist of the text to see if it is what I am looking for. The second half of the semester I worked on being able to use my Japanese language skills to start translating from Japanese to English while keeping the cultural factors involved still present in the English version. We did this through several authentic Japanese sources, such as newspaper articles, and this allowed for us to better understand what daily Japanese is like. This course also helped me better understand the ways pitch accents and pronunciation can change the meaning of the sentence, something that I had not previously considered. Overall, this course was extremely useful in developing my Japanese language skills. At the end of the semester I worked on translating an article from English to Japanese. This project allowed me to practice translating in a direction that I had not previously practiced and that was more difficult for me to do than the Japanese to English translations that we had done previously. This assignment also taught me the differences in translating depending on the medium that the information is being presented in. The sentences that we translated were from newspaper articles and that meant that the Japanese I used needed to be less formal than the Japanese that I use when speaking. This assignment allowed for me to see that language used in news article translating is different from the ways that books or other media would be translated. Having the exposure to a difference that does not exist as much in English also caused me to look at the ways that I study Japanese more seriously.
This course is an introduction to translating and interpreting that provides an overview of the knowledge necessary for the field of translation and interpretation. Students will study general issues involved in translating and interpreting and the building blocks for the necessary knowledge and techniques including rapid reading, analyzing, summarizing and paraphrasing, listening comprehension, and shadowing. This class will be conducted in Japanese.
MLO's:
This course meets MLO 1, MLO 2, and MLO 4.
Course Narrative:
This course allowed for me to further develop my understanding of Japanese language. I was able to expand my knowledge of Kanji and developed skills necessary to identify a variety of radicals in order to find and understand the Kanji that I do not know. While developing my Kanji skills I was also able to use that skill to read paragraphs more fluidly as well as have a better comprehension while doing so. Through our usage of the textbook for the course, I was able to work on using my comprehension skills to identify the main themes in a text even if I did not understand all of the text that I read. We also worked on scanning and skimming texts so that we could more quickly find the information that we were looking for as well as quickly determine the gist of the text to see if it is what I am looking for. The second half of the semester I worked on being able to use my Japanese language skills to start translating from Japanese to English while keeping the cultural factors involved still present in the English version. We did this through several authentic Japanese sources, such as newspaper articles, and this allowed for us to better understand what daily Japanese is like. This course also helped me better understand the ways pitch accents and pronunciation can change the meaning of the sentence, something that I had not previously considered. Overall, this course was extremely useful in developing my Japanese language skills. At the end of the semester I worked on translating an article from English to Japanese. This project allowed me to practice translating in a direction that I had not previously practiced and that was more difficult for me to do than the Japanese to English translations that we had done previously. This assignment also taught me the differences in translating depending on the medium that the information is being presented in. The sentences that we translated were from newspaper articles and that meant that the Japanese I used needed to be less formal than the Japanese that I use when speaking. This assignment allowed for me to see that language used in news article translating is different from the ways that books or other media would be translated. Having the exposure to a difference that does not exist as much in English also caused me to look at the ways that I study Japanese more seriously.