COLT 613 - Graduate Studies in Translation
CRN: 11742
Instructor: Tze-Yin Teo
Term: Fall 2018
Translation and the Means of Comparison
In this class, students will acquire a open vocabulary for imagining meaningful comparisons: a methodological vocabulary which lives alongside important concepts for translation studies. Whether multilingual, transnational, multicultural, hemispheric, transoceanic, global, or transhistorical, the act of comparison has always stepped beyond borders both material and imagined, and, in so doing, often translates the disciplinary object itself.
Students will begin by learning foundational concepts in translation studies before animating them in comparative contexts. For example, we may think about creolization alongside the concepts of intra-lingual and foreignizing translations in order to rethink the adjudicated borders of language; for another, we may turn towards recent hemispheric South-South comparisons through which an old translator’s chestnut of dynamic equivalence may transcend its initial conditions of thought, becoming imbued with an anti-capitalist strategy of transnational solidarity. By intersecting comparative frameworks with translation studies, the course shows how these two bodies of work dialectically extend one another.
The course is designed to complement existing courses in the Translation Studies Graduate Specialization. Its concepts have traction across critical work in the various national literary traditions, thus (a) preparing comparative literature students to make robust interventions in their chosen fields, and (b) preparing students of national languages and literatures to think expansively about their existing fields. The course is also likely to be of interest to graduate students whose work involves moving between languages, nations, and cultures in any substantive form.