Philadelphia University

Faculty of Arts - Department of English

2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Course Syllabus

Course Title: General Translation. Course Code: 120372

Level: Third Year Credit Hours: 3
Prerequisite: 120271 Lecture Time: 8:15-9:30 MW

Lecturer's Name: Dr. Duaa Salameh

Rank: Assistant Professor
Office Number: 406
Office Hours: Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday 9.00-10.00
Monday & Wednesday 8:30-9:30.

Phone: 4799000 Ext: 2601

E-mail: [email protected]

Course Coordinator: Dr. Duaa Salameh

“Each language articulates or organizes the world differently. Languages do not simply
name existing categories, they articulate their own.”
―Jonathan culler

"Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole

culture."
― Anthony Burgess

Course Description:

This course aims at providing students with a foundation in the theory, practice, and ethics of
translation. Specifically, the course will briefly address the history of translation; types of
translation—semantic or literal translation versus communication- or target-language-driven
translation; translation ethics; and the business of translation. Students will develop translation
judgment first by learning how to analyze texts in the source language

The course is meant to be engaging and comprehensive. We hope that students will investigate
some of the most effective translation strategies in various fields, including the field of mass
communication, politics, economics, literature, diplomacy, and legal.

Aims:

Students are expected to:

 Acquire a range of theoretical approaches to translation;

 Identify problems and use the appropriate theory to tackle these problems;

1
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 Demonstrate the processes and competencies in translating various texts from Arabic
into good, idiomatic English;
 Conduct basic research in translation.

Teaching Methods:

Teaching methods will focus on a wide variety of student-centered activities. They will include
individual student translations with analytical student participation, discussion, analysis, pair and
group work, peer editing, and feedback to stimulate students’ desire to translate and provide them
with skills and tools to tackle a wide range of texts. Major learning tools will be monolingual and
bilingual dictionaries as well as the Internet. There will be an ongoing assessment to monitor and
measure students’ progress; however, students will write two short papers and will take two tests
and a final exam.

Contribution to Program Learning Outcomes:

A5, B1, C1, C5, D1, D2, D3

Intended Learning Outcomes:

a. Knowledge & Understanding:

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

 Acquire good knowledge of the various translation theories and strategies;
 Articulate the strategy they would use to translate a text;
 Translate a variety of texts from Arabic into good, idiomatic English.

b. Intellectual Skills (Thinking & Analysis):

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

 Observe the style, format, and presentation of various discourses in English;

 appreciate differences in values and cultures;
 Use a range of strategies in addressing difficulties in translation in terms of
textual ambiguity and culture-bound terms.

c. Communicative Skills (Personal and Academic)

At the end of this course, students will be:

 Better equipped to comprehend a text, analyze its components, decide on key

issues, and translate it;

2
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 More able to put the English translation into an organic whole, observing
cohesion, coherence, paragraphing, diction, discourse markers, etc.

d. Practical and Subject Specific Skills (Transferable Skills)

At the end of this course a student will be:

 Able to communicate effectively complex ideas, using the appropriate translation

strategy;
 Able to apply their acquired knowledge to actual translation projects on the
ground.

Modes of Assessment Score Date

First Exam 20 8 NOVEMBER
Second Exam 20 20 DECEMBER
Assignments / Seminars / Projects / Quizzes / Tutorials, 20
Reports, Research Projects, Presentations
Final Exam 40 To be announced later
Total 100

Documentation and Academic Honesty

Students are expected to complete all homework, papers and projects independently (unless
otherwise specified); any work must be yours and yours alone. Working together for anything
other than data collection, relying on students' work from previous semesters and/or plagiarizing
published research is considered cheating.

Documentation Style (with illustrative examples)

Reference list styles

Note: it is usual to italicize book titles; however, if you are not able to do this, you should
underline them instead.

* Book
Trudgill, P. and Hannah, J. (1994, 3rd edn) International English, London, Edward Arnold.
Fodor, J.A. (1983) The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harré, R. and Gillett, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. London: Sage.

* Chapter/ extract from an edited collection

Harris, J. (1993) 'The grammar of Irish English' in Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (eds) Real English:
the grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, London, Longman.

* Paper in a journal of magazine

Wales, L. (1994) 'Royalese: the rise and fall of "the Queen's English" ', English Today, vol. 10,
no.3, pp. 3-10.

3
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
* Journal article:
Roulet, E. (1997). 'A Modular Approach to Discourse Structures'. Pragmatics 7(2), 125–46.

* Book article:

Sinha, Chris. (1999). 'Grounding, mapping and acts of meaning'. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker
(Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics, Foundations, Scope and Methodology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
pp. 223-256.

* Magazine article:
Posner, M. I. (1993, October 29). Seeing the mind. Science, 262, 673-674.

* Daily newspaper article:

'New drug appears to sharply cut risk of death from heart failure'. (1993, July 15). The
Washington Post, p. A12.

* Entry in an encyclopedia:
Bergman, P. G. (1993). 'Relativity'. In The new encyclopedia Britannica (Vol. 26, pp. 501-508).
Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

* Documenting Web Sources

Burka, Lauren P. 'A Hypertext History of Multi-User Dimensions.' MUD History. 1993.
<http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/1pb/mud-history.html> (5 Dec. 1994).

For more about MLA Style for Citing Print and Web Sources, see:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01

1. Guidelines for Typewritten Work

All of your work must be typed and should follow these MLA formatting guidelines:
 Double-spaced, including identifying information
 Times New Roman 12-point font
 1-inch margins on all four sides
 Title is centered and not printed in bold
 Stapled in upper-left corner and thoroughly proofread for spelling and grammatical errors
 Last name and page number in upper-right heading of each page, including the first page
 Double-spaced identifying information in upper-left corner of first page.

*Please note that work not adhering to these guidelines will be returned unread and ungraded.

2. Protection of Copyright

4
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Publications in all forms require permission from the copyright owner in advance. You are not
allowed to reproduce, store in a retrieval system, or transmit, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publisher or a license from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. (www.cla.co.uk).

Any cheating or plagiarism will result in disciplinary action to be determined by the instructor
based on the severity and nature of the offense.

3. Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that is illegal and unethical and will result in your failing
the course. “Plagiarism” means stealing words and/or ideas and passing them off as your own.
This includes ideas you read (in books, journals, on the internet…), but also getting someone to
write your essays for you or to substantially edit them.

Course Outline

Material to be
Week Homework/Reports and their due dates
covered
(1) 7-11 Oct Introduction
(2) 14-18 Oct Equivalence at Word
level
(3) 21-25 Oct Equivalence above
Word level
(4) 28 Oct-1 Nov Grammatical
Equivalence
(5) 4-8 Nov Textual
Equivalence
1ST EXAMINATION: 8 NOVEMBER
(6) 11-15 Nov Pragmatic
Equivalence
(7) 18-22 Nov Literary translation
(8) 25-29 Nov Literary translation
(9) 2-6 Dec Mass Media
Translation
(10) 9-13 Dec Mass Media
Translation
2ND EXAMINATION: 13 DECEMBER
(11) 16-20 Dec Political/ Diplomatic
Translation
(12) 23-27 Dec Political/ Diplomatic
Translation
(13) 30-3 Jan 2013 Economic
Translation
(14) 6-10 Jan Economic

5
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Translation
FINAL EXAM: TO BE ANNOUNCED BY REGISTRATION

Expected Workload:

On average students are expected to spend at least (2) hours of study for each 50- minute lecture/
tutorial.

Attendance
Attendance is required. Translation 372 is a small seminar-like course and the presence of each
student matters. You need to be in class, on time, prepared, every time we meet. This matters for
your own learning as well as for the contributions you can make to the learning of others. For
those unavoidable times when you are sick or otherwise unable to come to class, the attendance
policy allows some absences without penalty. It is always considerate to notify your instructor by
email about an absence. If you miss class, it is your responsibility to find out what you missed
and to make up any work as required.

Absence from lectures and /or tutorials may not exceed 15% . Students who exceed the 15% limit
without a medical or emergency excuse acceptable to and approved by the Dean of the relevant
faculty shall not be allowed to take the final examination and shall receive a mark of zero for the
course. If the excuse is approved by the Dean, the student will be considered to have withdrawn
from the course.

Participation

Just attending class and turning in your work on time are not enough. I expect you to read the
assigned material and engage with course readings and each other, to respond to questions in
class and to share ideas with peers. You should always come to class having completed all
assignments, reading or writing. In other words, you need to come to each class meeting prepared
to be an active participant. Participation in class will provide you with opportunities to practice
your English and improve your listening as well as speaking skills. Speaking up during class is
easier for some than others. I can help out if you don’t know how to enter the conversation—
contact me, and we will find a way to tackle the issue.

Course Policies:

1. You are allowed up to (5) absences on Mondays/Wednesdays or (7) absences on

Sundays/Tuesdays/Thursdays. If you exceed this number, you will fail the course.
2. Excessive or habitual tardiness may be counted as an absence.
3. Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that will result in your failing the course.
4. Learning notes by heart and repeating the information word by word in the exam is a type
of plagiarism.

6
 Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts - Department of English
2nd Semester, 2012/2013
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
5. Make-up exams will be offered for valid reasons only with the consent of the Dean

Course Components:

I. Required Text

- Baker, Mona. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge, 1992.

II. Supplementary Readings

- Aziz, Yowell Y. and Muftah S. Lataiwish. Principles of Translation. Dar Annahda

Alarabiya

- Jackson, Howard. Words and Their Meaning. London: Longman, 1988.

- Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London:

Routledge, 2001.

- Newmark, Peter. Approaches to Translation. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982.