Diagnostic Quiz
I have always been interested in language since I was very little, even though I probably did not realize it at first. I learned grammatical rules in Spanish fairly easily compared to most of my classmates. When I started learning English, I also got the hang of it with no major issues. I even started getting interested in learning French at a young age, and started taking French classes outside of my usual school schedule. When I finished high school, I struggled to figure out what I wanted to study in college; I considered studying something involving Chemistry, because it was a subject that I handled well in school, but I started to lose some of my interest in Chemistry in my final year of high school. I eventually decided to study something involving English, because it is something I have always liked and handled well. I decided to apply for the English with Emphasis in Translation when I found it, and now I am here.
A project I want to pursue in the future is to work in something that involves English. Another reason why I decided to study this career is because I thought that applying my interest and skill in the English language for a jobwas a good idea. I am still unsure of where I would start, but it is something that I want to figure out for when I finish college.
Critical thinking skills are necessary for every aspect of life, and can be applied in everything we do, whether we realize it or not. For example, I might want to go out to the mall tomorrow, but I find out that this weekend is the Black Weekend, which means that malls will be very full, there will not be many parking spots available, and there will be a lot of traffic. Keeping these factors in mind, I can decide that it is better for me to not go to the mall this Saturday, and wait for the next weekend. Critical thinking skills are essential in the field of translation, because you need them to determine what the best way to translate something is. For example, if I were to translate the English expression "it's none of your business", the literal translation in Spanish would be "no es tu negocio". But using critical thinking skills, I can identify that translating that expression literally into Spanish does not sound natural, and I would have to adapt it in a way that makes sense in Spanish, like "no es asunto tuyo" or "no es de tu incumbencia".
Portfolio
Project 1: Scientific news articles were used, the English one was about fish that can taste the seafloor, and the Spanish one was about the oldest cheese every recorded. In Project 1A they were paraphrased into their respective language, and in Project 1B they were translated into the opposite language.
Project 2: Chapters of a translation course were used. Project 2A was for the summarizing of Translation as a mental process, and Project 2B was for the translating of the summaries of The meaning of meaning.
Project 3: Translations of literary texts. Project 3A is from El Capitán Alatriste by Arturo and Carlota Pérez-Reverte, and Project 3B is from The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
Project 4: Translations of TED Talks that were converted into text form. Project 4A is a Spanish video about society's relationship with work, and Project 4B is an English video about the "capital sins" of communication.
Project 5: Translations of legal documents. Project 5A is an English document about launching objects into space, and Project 5B is a Spanish document about data collection.
Optional Project 1: Adaptation of the song "Let It Grow" from The Lorax, originally in English and adapted into Spanish. Here is the link for the Optional Project 1
Optional Project 2: Translation of an exerpt from Othelo by William Shakespeare, originally in English and translated into Spanish. Here is the link for the Optional Project 2
Conclusion
This course provided me with useful tools to further understand translation. The moodle activities were good to learn the theory, while the google site activities were good to put the topics into practice. While the moodle activities provided useful information, the google site activities were more entertaining.
The most interesting projects for me were the literary and legal projects, because it was interesting to see how the specific style of the texts could be adapted into a translation, which doesn't happen in the same way for the news articles or TED talks, for example. Another project that was very interesting to me was the song adaptation, because the changes that happen when you adapt a song can be even more distinct
Overall, this course has been very important to shape my perspective of what translation is and what it can be. Not only do things change when you translate a text into a different language, those changes depend on what kind of text it is. Also, we can define those changes using the translation procedures, but there's a lot of procedures that can be present in a text, and even more than one procedure can be present in the same phrase. I'm very thankful for what I learned in this course