Syllabus
Week 1
Intro/Fiction I
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (excerpt)
- Basic theoretical grounding, proofreading a dated Czech translation
Week 2
Fiction II
Ken Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (excerpt)
- fidelity and aesthetic fluency as the organizing criterion of an artistic translation / accuracy vs fluency
Week 3-4
Journalese I
Jude Sheerin: Malawi windmill boy with big fans
- idiomatic expression, collocation, adverbial expression in Czech and English
Week 5-6
Journalese II
William Saletan: No smoking in your own apartment
- idiomatic expression, collocation, functional sentence perspective
Week 7-8
Journalese III
Gretchen Rubin: A secret to happiness? Don’t get organized
Week 9
Poetry
Benjamin Zephaniah: Miss World & Talking Turkeys
- basics of prosody, meter as the corset of poetic translation
Week 10-11
Fiction III
Allyson Armistead: A Girl in Red (excerpt)
- explicitation, hypernymy, co-hyponymy, authorial autonomy (creative licence)
Week 12
Dubbing from audio
Ken Robinson: a TED lecture on creativity (excerpt)
- dubbing from audio into a script; translation and peer-review
Annotation
This course aims to familiarise students with various translation techniques applied to selected samples of Anglo-American documentary or near-documentary prose, journalese, short fiction, poetry and drama. The course puts strong emphasis on translations from English into Czech.