Market Strategies & Critical Perspectives for Chinese-English Translators

Catalog description

This course invites bilinguals to commute between Chinese and English to examine how speakers of one or the other or both languages coexist, interact, and translate* in the US and metropolises around the world. With a focus on translation activity in the marketplace the course examines the intercultural and interlingual dynamics that pertain where mono- and (semi)bi-lingual speakers conduct business and social exchange in and between Chinese and English. Students will practice mediative transposition, rewriting, and multimodal and transcreative strategies in translating business and cultural contents particularly in the promotion and marketing of new media content between Chinese and English. Through these exercises students will explore how diverse cultural assumptions and ethnolinguistic identities play into global exchange determining what gets translated or not, how, and in which direction, and who controls meaning and messaging across linguistic systems. *The term ‘translation’ includes ‘verbal interpreting’ in this context.