Lecture: 1 hour per week
Seminar: 3 hours per week
- lecture/seminar
- small group work
- translation practice tasks
- course readings/videos
Key linguistic differences between English and ASL:
- Use of face and space
- Common sentence types, syntactical structures and discourse markers
- Time/tense markers
- Pronominalization
- Prepositional and adverbial information
- Pluralization
- Contextualization and topicalization
Analysis parameters in English and ASL texts:
- Variables of the cultural, situational, relational, psychological context(s)
- Implied and explicit propositions, main points and supporting details
- Culturally-linked elements
- Linguistic register
- Speaker/signer characteristics and goals
- Emotional affect and tone
- Metanotative qualities/style of the speaker/signer
- Contextual force relative to target audience characteristics and goals
Power and responsibility inherent in the tasks of translation/interpretation:
- Meaning-making as a shared process of co-construction
- Linguistic and cultural mediation
- Awareness of positionality and bias
- Challenges in aiming for dynamic equivalence and impartiality
Steps and sub-processes in translation/interpretation:
- Predicting what to expect from the discourse
- Concentrating and attending to source message
- Representing meaning, dropping source language form
- Preparing to express meaning using target language form
- Producing target message
- Monitoring and critiquing one’s own process and results
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Use contextual cues to predict discourse content and intent
- Use discourse mapping to represent meaning
- Analyze English and ASL texts to identify speaker goals, linguistic register, emotional affect and culturally-linked elements
- Prioritize text content, identifying main points and supporting details
- Identify both implied and explicit propositions in source texts
- Apply contextual factors to the process of meaning-based translation
- Compose equivalent messages in the target language
- Demonstrate the creation of culturally mediated translation texts
- Explain the steps involved in the processes of discourse analysis and translation
- Critically evaluate the relative success/effectiveness of a translation
Assessment will be in accordance with the Douglas College Evaluation Policy. Evaluation will be based on a combination of individual and group work, and at the instructor’s discretion may include presentations, written assignments, papers, quizzes and/or exams.
A typical distribution of graded assignments follows:
- English to ASL Translation Assignment: 35%
- ASL to English Translation Assignment: 35%
- Quizzes: 15%
- Written Reflection/Analyses: 15%
This is a letter graded course.
A list of required and optional textbooks and materials is provided for students at the beginning of each semester.