ATS3083: Translating Across Cultures

This unit had five streams this semester: German, Italian, Spanish, French and Japanese. In past semesters there was Chinese and Vietnamese too I think, but I’m not sure whether they’ll bring those back or not. I was in the Japanese stream. It’s necessary for you to have a relatively high level of proficiency in your chosen language stream, otherwise you won’t be able to grasp the intricacies of what you’re translating. Lectures are in English. Tutes are streamed into your languages. There’s only one tute time for each language stream, so you’ll have to work around it in your timetable. Each tute stream will have two tutors – one native speaker and one English background speaker proficient in your LOTE.

I felt like the lectures were kind of a waste of time, because all assessment in this unit is practical. Beyond serving as a means for you to get an understanding of the key terminology, I honestly don’t think there’s much point to them.

I feel that your mark in this unit is largely dependent on your level of language proficiency more than anything else. For me, I was getting HDs in the LOTE --> Eng translations, but only Ds in the Eng --> LOTE translations because my Japanese proficiency isn’t exactly absolute (I’m not good with idioms, flowery language… that sort of stuff, which happens to be important in translation). I can’t speak for all the language streams obviously, but everyone in the Japanese stream for this unit was either a native speaker, or studying Japanese Advanced 5 concurrently this semester. I think perhaps you’d also be okay with Japanese Advanced 3.

The other thing that will help you get a good mark is your ability to bullshit. So long as you demonstrate a bit of commonsense and you can justify it in your brief, you can pretty much translate your work however you want.

Overall, I think the assessment in this unit was pretty easy, though biased towards people with higher language proficiency. Putting the assessment aside though, this unit is practical and thus very applicable to real life. It doesn’t teach you about translation so much as it teaches you how to translate, which I think is far more useful and more important.

I felt like this unit was a good chance for me to be less concerned about assessments and more about learning for the sake of learning. It’s a third year unit, but I don’t think it’s particularly hard. Overall, this is a unit I found engaging, and that I would recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the practical side of translation and linguistics.
This unit will help you a LOT if you're studying Japanese and intend to do ATS3152 later on, which also has a heavy emphasis on translation.

The unit coordinator is Kenta Koshiba, but he only does about two lectures himself. He organises for a different guest speaker to come in each week and speak about different topics related to translation. As far as I remember, the guest speakers are all university staff whom teach other units too. The unit as a whole is designed to be practical, so in the lectures there’s some theory but also lots of general discussion and examples. I think Kenta ran out of guest lecturers, because we only had lectures up until Week 10. Kenta himself is a really easygoing guy. The quality of the lectures varies week-to-week obviously, and is dependent on the quality of the guest speaker.

No sample exam, and I don’t think there are any past exams in the database… I don’t think you really need any though.

4 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture.

This unit doesn’t have a textbook.

Weekly 1.5h Lecture (called a "seminar" but really a lecture)
Weekly 2h Tute

Sem 1, 2013.

Exam results aren’t out yet, but HD overall for the in-semester stuff.