Translation Theory: Comparative Approaches and Case Studies

(4 Credits)

The aim of this course is to introduce students to some key texts and issues in the history of translation theory that help us situate translation in an expanded field of comparative literary studies, cross-cultural analysis, world-making, epistemological borders, ecologies of language, politics, and media theory. Topics include: the figure of the translator/interpreter/mediator as a go-between or suspected traitor in key literary works; a brief history of translation theory; translational afterlife: questions of survival and cultural memory; debates in translation studies relating to the politics of difference and untranslatability in world literature; the politics of translation in relation to questions of nationalism, cultural appropriation, linguistic apartheid, accent tests (linguistic passporting), and outlaw dialects; the emerging field of linguistic ecology, with a focus on vocabularies of nature, planet, cosmos, ecocide, and extraction; and translation studies in the era of AI, machine translation, and computational humanities (what is a unit of translatability? How are concepts of what a language is changing? Are memes a new media language? Can algorithms be considered a language?)