Translation Workshop

In the Translation Workshop, we pursue the goal of creating English versions that capture as fully as possible our interpretive understanding of literary works originally composed in other languages.  The ideal translation, as George Steiner puts it in After Babel, would "achieve an equilibrium...between two works, two languages, two communities of historical experience and contemporary feeling."  This idea, we should admit at the beginning, cannot be attained.  Even the best translation can hope only for partial success.

The Translation Workshops provide students with a forum for developing skills and techniques of reading, interpreting, and writing.  In the workshop itself, students examine general issues of translation and, as the semester proceeds, offer detailed criticism and advice on each other's work in progress.  Frequently, specific problems of translation are worked out by the members of the Translation Workshop during a particular session.  The emphasis in the workshop is on the actual working out of problems and what steps have to be taken to produce a successful translation.  The active participation of all students is therefore very necessary, and students are asked to formulate their interpretive interaction with a text through critical language.  Although the final goal in the Translation Workshop is to produce a polished, final version of a text, students will often reconstruct the various steps that lead to an understanding and interpretation of a text through critical and scholarly language.  Thus, the act of translation will not only strengthen their ability to translate but also their ability to express their interpretive insights through critical language.  The constant flow between critical thinking and the actual preparation of a translation will take place. Students who have taken the workshop should expect to refine their methods of critical thinking through the processes applied in translation and through the ways these methodologies can then be transferred to interdisciplinary thinking and interdisciplinary problem solving in general.

Another goal of the Translation Workshop is to provide students with information on the contemporary world of translation, with respect to journals that publish translations; and a general introduction to new translations of international authors into English.