Translation and Transcultural Studies

We're looking forward to welcoming you into our community of translators and transcultural communicators! Below are some suggested activities to help you as you prepare to join us.

All practice is good practice

Translation is a practical skill as well as an area of cultural and theoretical discussion, and all experience is useful. Get some practice before the course starts by having a go at translating different types of texts from your languages into English: you could try short news texts, recipes, stories and poems (including any you've studied for A-level), social media posts, or website content. Start thinking about your style and priorities as a translator: what do you think is important and/or difficult, and how does this affect your translation work?

Read like a translator

Reading translations can help you to develop your own translation skills by thinking about what makes a 'good' translation from the reader's perspective. What do you enjoy when you read a translated text or watch subtitled/dubbed films and TV? What works for you (e.g. footnotes, use of foreign words in the text), and what doesn't?

Read about translators

To give you a general idea of how translators see some of the challenges above, you could read some of the following:

• Anna Aslanyan, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History (London: Profile Books, 2021)

This enjoyable book explores some key moments in history when translation has had a decisive influence on events.

• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (London: Routledge, 2012)

This is a light-hearted tour of some of the joys and difficulties of translation.

LN102 Translation: Methods and Practice

This cross-School module is core for the BA in Modern Languages with TTS, and is an option for students on the BA in Modern Languages. It introduces you to the principles of Translation Studies, including the challenges that translators encounter and the strategies that can be used to overcome them. You will learn how to critically analyse translations and how to explore translation as a process of negotiation between texts and cultures. This module will give you an opportunity to engage in the practice of translation and to analyse your own translation strategies.

For more information, see the module description at: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/tts/ln102/

As above, practice is key, but if you would like to do some background reading for this module, you could have a look at one of the following:

• Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (London: Routledge, 1992)

This book offers a systematic approach to the training of translators, reflecting on the main intricacies involved in rendering a text from one language into another.

• Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2001)

This book is a guide to the theories and concepts that make up the dynamic field of translation studies. Each theory is applied to a wide range of languages, including Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese and Spanish.

• Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories (London: Routledge, 2009)

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the core contemporary paradigms of Western translation theory. It includes examples from a range of languages and a wealth of tasks and activities.

• Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2014)

This book is the updated 4th edition of the publication that marked the beginning of the discipline in the Western world in the late 1970s. It explores crucial problems of translation and offers a history of translation theory, beginning with the ancient Romans and encompassing key twentieth-century approaches to translation.

For more information, you can contact Head of Translation and Transcultural Studies, Dr Qian Liu: qian dot liu dot 1 at warwick dot ac dot uk