Translation

Using a lecture-seminar format, this introductory course will familiarize students with the essentials of translation studies as a theoretical interdiscipline in the historical, linguistic & cultural context and beyond. The course is aimed at analysing assigned (non-)literary translations in a workshop setting in order to enable course attendees to gain a multifaceted insight into the nature of a translator´s job. Lectures are designed to acquaint students with basic TS-terminology, equivalence and skopos theories, the loss & gain issues, discourse analysis and translation shifts as well as basic translation methods & techniques drawing on prominent foreign translation studies scholars and the Slovak school of translation with respect to literary translation. Seminars are based on translating sample texts representing various text genres and styles and selected translation problems with detailed examination of lexical, syntactic, stylistic (and aesthetic/pragmatic) dimensions of the source and target texts. Besides honing translation skills course attendees will have developed particular sets of stylistic creativity through considerable practice in (non-)literary translating, thus adding to their “experiential complex.”