Translating the Untranslatable

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will address problems of culture-specific aspects in translation -- translation of idioms,associative layers in literary texts, allusions of all sorts, both linguo-cultural and political, differences in syntactic structures and types of semantic emphasis, and ways to avoid calques. Students will work on a whole array of texts that, for one reason or another, are considered to be "untranslatable." At the very least, we will try to define what is untranslatable -- i.e., culture- or structure-specific -- about them. This will allow students to learn ways to compensate for the untranslatable and to switch from one cultural code to the other, from the original language to the target one. The course will require in-class translation as well as a final project presented to the whole class, different for every student and based on his/her respective personal interest or area of concentration. Both in-class translations and these projects are to be graded. The final project is worth 50% of the grade. Most of the discussion will be in Russian, but the projects are, naturally, bilingual.