Day 2
THURS. Oct. 27
Guess-the-genre exercise
Share English advertising slogans
“Plums in the Icebox” exercise
Share observations on Sheng Keyi
Homework:
➤ Questionnaire: which genres are you most interested in translating?
due at midnight this Friday (China time)
Fill out this Qualtrics questionnaire to tell me how interested you are in translating various different genres. I’ll assign you to groups for your first and second translation challenges based on your responses.
➤ Read classmates’ advertising slogans
Read your classmates’ advertising slogans in the folder “1-Ad slogan translations” on SharePoint. Pick two or three you think are especially well-done and come to next class ready to share them with us and tell us why you like them.
➤ “Plums in the Icebox” exercises
Read your classmates’ translations of William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say” as a note on the fridge. I’ve put them in the folder on SharePoint called “4-Notes on the fridge.”
Come to next class ready to tell us: Which of these translations strikes you as most like an actual note left on the fridge? (In other words, in which one does the style most fit the genre of “note on a fridge”?)
Next, read “This is Just to Say” as it was originally written (as a poem). Ask yourself: What makes it a poem? What qualities make it “poetic”? (Is it poetic?)
Then, make your own translation of “This is Just to Say” as a poem, with line breaks. (I’m sure there are plenty of Chinese translations out there on the Internet; don’t look at them, just make your own decisions.) In your translation, try to capture whatever it is about the original that strikes you as “poetic,” whatever you understand that to mean.
Submit your translation on Sakai. Don’t include your name on the document.
➤ Prepare to translate “Ad” by Kenneth Fearing
Read Kenneth Fearing’s poem “Ad,” written in 1938. This is a poem written in the form of a want advertisement (an advertisement for a job opening in a newspaper), using some of the conventional language that we associate with the genre of want advertisements. (Click here to see some examples of old English-language want advertisements in newspapers—this is what the poem is parodying.)
Later, I’ll ask you to translate this poem. For next class, please do the following:
1) Read the poem and ask yourself: What do I need to understand better about this poem in order to translate this well? Prepare two or three questions to ask a native English speaker (me or a guest) about the poem, and be ready to ask them next class.
2) Do a little research into Chinese want advertisements (招聘广告 / 招聘启事)—find some examples of this genre in Chinese. What are some conventional words / phrases / sentence patterns that appear in this kind of text?Upload an example of a Chinese want advertisement (or any other text in Chinese that you think could serve as an inspiration for translating this poem) to the folder “5-Chinese want advertisements” on SharePoint.
➤Looking ahead: Prepare to translate a museum placard
Next week I’ll also ask you to translate the text of the museum placard pictured here into English. (This is from an artifact at a recent exhibition at the Suzhou Museum.)
灯作卧羊形。羊首微扬，双角卷曲，身躯浑圆。羊尊背部与身躯分铸，于羊颈后置活纽，臀上安提纽，可将羊背向上翻开，平放于羊头上作为灯盘。羊尊腹腔中空，当灯放置不同时，可将灯盘内燃余灯油由小流嘴倾入腹腔。出土时腹腔内残留有白色沉淀物，经化验有油脂成分，当为燃料。汉代以羊为母题的文物很多，如羊头金饰、塑像画像、含“羊”字的铭文铜镜，主要取其和美吉祥之意。汉代诗歌中更有 “金羊载耀，作明以续” 的称颂。
To prepare to translate this placard, please look at the examples of English museums I’ve included here. Ask yourself: What are the conventions of this genre? Write five observations (five sentences that begin with the words “I noticed…”) about the style of the language you see here. What types of words are often used or not used? What sentence patterns are often used or not used? etc.
Write your five sentences on a Word document and upload them to SharePoint, to the folder “6-Observations on English museum placards.”
➤ Supplementary reading
The chapter 《无用之用，其乐无穷》 in 《翻译之镜》by 王岫庐 contains some interesting insights about the “Plums in the Icebox” exercise we did in class. (Full disclosure: I got the idea from reading this chapter!)
(Chinese learners: I recommend just skimming over the academic parts and reading the description of the exercise itself.)