Workshop in Social Science Translation

UCLA, June 25 – July 20, 2007 Instructor: Professor Michael Heim

Workshop in
Social Science Translation

UCLA, June 25 – July 20, 2007 -  Instructor: Professor Michael Heim

This course is funded by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for Southeast European Languages. It is also open to students who work with other languages.

Fellowships to cover most, or all, of the cost of the course are available.

The Workshop in Social Science Translation is a four-week summer session graduate course for students in any social science discipline with a reading knowledge of any foreign language.

1. Its primary goal is to teach students to render scholarly texts in their fields from the language they use in their research into English.
2. A secondary goal is to advance the students’ knowledge of their research languages.

Each week students will attend two three-hour workshop sessions and one one-and-a-half hour tutorial session, for a total of thirty hours.

Workshop sessions: Students will learn the general principles of translation, understood not as a theory but as practical ways of coping with the choices a translator must make. Reading assignments will include selected works on translation. Students will work independently and in class on a translation project (an article or book chapter) of their own choosing.

Tutorial sessions: Students will do extensive reading of source-language texts in their chosen fields, based on bibliographies they themselves put together. They will take notes on the texts in English and discuss them with their tutors. The object of the sessions is for students to learn to make sense of texts whose every word they do not know and to increase their vocabulary. At tutorial sessions students may also seek assistance with their translation projects.

Course objectives: At the end of the course the students will 1) be primed to produce publishable translations of works in their fields and 2) have improved their reading comprehension and acquired strategies for improving on their own.

Students wishing to enroll in the workshop will submit an application, by e-mail attachment to cwl@international.ucla.edu, containing the following documentation:

• a curriculum vitae, including a list of relevant courses
• a bibliography containing three or four books and/or articles the applicant wishes to read in the language proposed for study
• a translation into English of three pages from one of the books or articles
• a statement of purpose outlining the applicant’s major interests and past training in both the language applied for and other languages
• two letters of recommendation, one from the professor most closely acquainted with their work and one from their most recent language instructor.

Please use the same e-mail address for questions about the course.

For more info please contact:
Richard Gunde
(310) 825-8683
gunde@ucla.edu

Published: Friday, April 20, 2007

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