ADVICE FOR STUDENTS
This is the 3rd year translation course from Italian into English. During the year we shall be translating texts taken from newspaper or magazine articles.
Each week I shall set you a translation to do at home. The texts I usewillbepublished on my personal page (sito dell’università, strutture e persone, cercapersone, inserire il mio nome, cliccare sul mio nome, in fondo alla pagina si vedono i file da scaricare). Please make sure you come to class having already done the translation. In order to improve, it is essential to understand what mistakes you tend to make and why you make them, so there is absolutely NO point in coming to lessons just to copy down the corrected version.
Each lesson will be roughly divided into two parts (I say roughly because everything depends on how long it takes us to correct the translation set for homework). During the first part, we shall go through the translation and I shall try and explain any errors in grammar, lexical and syntactical choices. I’ll try because at this level, it is often simply a question of use and connotation, so you might have to simply accept the answer ‘è così’. Please do not hesitate to ask if there is some aspect in the correction that is not clear. Once we’ve finished correcting your work, I shall present a possible translation of the text. This is because in the past I have seen that students’supposedly corrected work is still full of errors, so I believe it is important for students to see a possible translation so that any spelling errors or any other misunderstandings in the correction can be adjusted. However this translation is MY work and except in highly exceptional circumstances I do not distribute it to students or publish it on my personal page. So please do not send me an email a couple of weeks before the exam asking me for the texts and their corrected versions.
One important matter is the way you correct your work.Your errors must be SEEN so use red, green, pink, orange or whatever colour you wish (NOT pencil) so that the corrections you make are visible. It is also a good idea to make a list of errors that you have made at the end of each translation, one column for grammatical errors and another for lexical errors. In this way it is easier to go over your mistakes from one week to the next and also to revise just before the exam.
The second part of the lesson will be dedicated to either the revision of a particular grammar point or an unseen translation. During the exam you will not have the time and the instruments that you have at home to translate a text so an unseen translation is meant to help you to make quick decisions about how to translate and makes more use of your instinctive knowledge of English. One of the major problems with translation is obviously the difficulty todistance yourself from the original, in this case from Italian. To make this easier, it is necessary to immerse yourselves as much as possible in the English language on a constant, regular basis. Reading is one way to do this – read as much as you can. It doesn’t have to be classicalliterature, just anything you LIKE. But read EVERY day. Similarly , watch television – not films, reality shows or soaps but current affairs programmes, the news and documentaries.
DICTIONARIES
You’ll need both a monolingual and a bilingual dictionary. For each word you find in the bilingual dictionary you’ll need to check its meaning and usage in the monolingual dictionary.
Method of Translation
For the text to translate at home, you should try the rolling translation method. This has 7 stages:
1)Read the original text a number of times to understand it and ‘get the feel’ of it.
2)Look up in the bilingual dictionary ONLY those words that you feel are impossible to translate by any other means (see translating lexical items below).
3) Check each of the options that the bilingual dictionary gives you for each word in the monolingual dictionary and make a choice according to the context.
4) Write out a rough translation, checking on any grammar points you are not sure about as you go.
5) Put both the original text and your rough translation away.
6) After a couple of days, take ONLY your rough version. Read it through underlining those parts that don’t sound quite right and try and correct them. Do NOT refer back to the text in Italian.
7) Do the same after another couple of days. The more often you go back to your rough version and correct it, the better your final version will be.
Translating lexical items
If you think you don’t know a word, there are a number of ways to try and find a suitable translation.
1)Find a synonym in Italian and then translate.
2) Rephrase the sentence to avoid a direct translation of the word you don’t know. For example, ‘imieidiscorsi’ can be translated with ‘what I said’ as nominalisation is often avoided in English.
3) Guess! English has avery large vocabulary thanks to the influence of both Germanic languages and languages of Greek and Latin origin.Thus an Italian word may have a very similar equivalent in English though be very careful with false friends and always check the meaning in the monolingual dictionary.