Theory and Techniques of English Translation

The aim of this course is to provide students with methodological tools to analyse audiovisual and literary texts from a translation perspective. Students will learn how to examine a text from a linguistic, sociolinguistic, stylistic and rhetorical point of view, taking into consideration the socio-historical-cultural context in which the text was produced and its authorial and linguistic peculiarities. The course also aims at increasing the students' awareness of the different issues a translator should tackle; in fact, a selected choice of texts spoken/written in English will be addressed considering the interdependence between commissioner, translator and model spectator/reader.

At the end of the course students will be familiar with the main theories that have animated and still animate the international panorama of Translation Studies. Particular attention will be paid to the recent discipline of Audiovisual Translation Studies and to contemporary translation theories - from the 1950s to the present - within the discipline of literary translation. Students will be able to identify the specific characteristics of an audiovisual text and a literary text. Thanks to different translation techniques students will be able to cope with the deforming tendencies, manipulations and rewritings that every text can undergo in translation.