Illness in Translation

4 units · Undergraduate upper division (100-199)

Seminar, three hours. Recommended preparation: intermediate knowledge of a second language. Exploration of how illness, suffering, and care move across languages, cultures, and systems of knowledge. Examination of what happens when experiences of the body are communicated across linguistic and cultural boundaries, particularly as they enter medical discourse. Consideration of what is lost, reshaped, or standardized as experiences of the body are translated; and how these exchanges are mediated in clinical and interpretive settings. Study brings together translation studies, narrative medicine, and literary texts, examining these questions through both theory and case studies. Topics include clinical encounters, colonial histories, and contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and machine translation and interpretation in health care. P/NP or letter grading.