Online Postgraduate Course in English-Spanish Translation of Contemporary Literature

Compulsory teaching unit, not evaluable.

Compulsory teaching unit, not evaluable.

Compulsory teaching unit, not evaluable.

This seminar has the aim of allowing the student to:

• Get a clear perspective of the job market.
• Understand the Intellectual Property Law and translation contracts to be able to negotiate them.
• Get to know the relationship between the editor and the translator.
• Know the rates of the publishing world and the different computing systems.
• Access very practical information on initial procedures: IAE, Social Security, etc.
• Learn to invoice and keep accounts.
• Find out which editorial assignments are most profitable.
• Know the professional associations and the entities for management of rights.
• Reflect on the importance of a presence on the Internet.
• Dismantle the myth that says that literary translations cannot provide a living.
• Apply everything learned to the resolution of a practical case.

The aim of this seminar is to provide a basic theoretical tool on copyright. Its recipients are the translators, understood as full authors of their own works, which are their translations.

First of all, literary translation needs to be located within the copyright source system. Why is literary translation recognized as a literary work, expressly protected by intellectual property laws? From this premise, once the condition of author is assimilated by the translator, it should be linked to the main legal figures in intellectual property: authorship, types of works, moral and economic rights, public domain and limits, paying particular attention to contracts and the correlative obligations of editors and authors/translators.

The co-ordinated work between the translator and the proofreader-editor is essential to obtain a good result in the publication of a translated work. The workshop wants make contact with this real professional context, with the job of the proofreader, editor and writer, both from the perspective of the translator who delivers their work to a publisher and from the point of view of the proofreader-editor who will make its publication possible.

The objective of this workshop is to learn research techniques in the digital age, assuming all the changes that have taken place in recent years in the information society, so that, at the end, each student is capable, not only of locating accurate information on the internet, but also evaluating the quality of a given source and its adequacy to our information needs at all times.

The objective of this workshop is to develop the ability to critically read your own translations in order to achieve a version that meets “publishable” requirements. With this in mind, we will have a discussion area in which some excerpts of the participants' translations will be published and where we will discuss translation errors, punctuation, style rules and writing fluency. We will also try to place them in their historical and geographical context to see which registry we use for the purpose, as we have said, of obtaining a product that meets the essential requirements for it to be published: fidelity to the original and good writing in Spanish. Where we failed, why some paragraphs are difficult to read and what we can do to improve them. From this critical reading and successive corrections we will see how a translation can be improved. Students will have to translate a fragment of a novel (The Memory Artists) by Jeffrey Moore and a fragment of an essay (The Pharaoh’s Shadow) by Anthony Sattin.

In this workshop we will ask ourselves what is a classic and what turns a literary text into a classic work, essential questions before entering into its translation. We will try to respond to them from the hand of scholars such as Italo Calvino and with the reflections that arise in the subject forums themselves. We will focus on the study of a short story by Robert Graves and a play by Edna St. Vincent Millay, both written in the first half of the 20th century. In any case, we will insist that not all ancient texts are classics, nor do all classics have to be ancient. Along these lines, we will see examples of current novels that are based on other classics (through intertextuality) or that could aspire to "contemporary classics."

The translation of contemporary narrative for the publishing sector is one of the main career opportunities for the literary translator. The objective of this workshop is to offer the student the opportunity to translate texts by contemporary authors and to provide relevant tools and strategies for this task. To do this, we will undertake the translation of three fragments of three stories selected by the tutor: The Lazy River by Zadie Smith, The Metal Bowl by Miranda July, and The Semplica-Girl Diaries by George Saunders.

This workshop is intended to offer an introduction to the translation of graphic novels and comics. The aim is for the participants to know the particularities of the translation of this medium and to take them into account when facing a translation task. Likewise, we will come to understood how the translation mechanisms of the different modalities end up being useful for any type of translation.

The workshop will consist of a brief theoretical part and a practical part. The brief theoretical block will consist of the following main points:

• Graphic novel and comic: the particularities of the medium and its translation.
• General translation process: working method, correction, and final delivery.
• Bibliography.

The practical part will consist of three nuclei of activities grouped into various themes. These nuclei have different extensions: the first will be the longest, the second somewhat shorter and the third, shorter, and all consist of the translation of vignettes from various graphic novels, which seek to collect the main peculiarities of this type of translation.

The workshop will consist of the translation of a series of fragments of three works of fantastic literature. Some texts lend themselves to very different interpretations and solutions, and it is interesting, above all, the debate that is generated among students about possible approaches, techniques, resources, etc. Other texts do not allow the translator to take many liberties, and that raises other types of difficulties. The fragments will be translated individually, but the translation problems and the possible ways of addressing them will be discussed in the debate space.

Translating into a language that is not your mother tongue is a difficult task. I tend to be sceptical and in my opinion few translators are able to carry out a satisfactory reverse translation, especially in the field of literature. But often when these translations are done in tandem, with a native speaker, the result is very good. In addition, it helps to test yourself by facing such a challenge. As T. S. Eliot said, only people who dare to go too far discover how far they can go.

So the teacher will come to this class begging to be convinced by all of you that literary translation into a non-native language is not only possible, but worthwhile. We know that it is necessary and that it can be technically achieved, but can you be a good reverse translator in the field of literature? English has become the lingua franca of our time, so I challenge you to show me that it can be done.

We will begin with a poetry translation exercise (by Ida Vitale), which involves the most direct and intense relationship we can have with language. We will also work with Leila Guerriero's texts for El País and translate a prose narration by Xuan Bello.

This workshop facilitates proposals and methods of approaching a more professionalized literature, which, without taking away what reading can grant, mobilizes strategies to make reading a platform prior to the work of writing or translating. The workshop, therefore, will test our capacities for text commentary as an organized reading practice in which documentation and recreation of the context as well as critical capacity and interpretation skills must be involved. The work will be based on the poem Pandémica y celeste by Gil de Biedma and the chapter A city without a river from the play Paseos con mi madre by Javier Pérez Andújar.

The objective of this workshop is to offer an introduction to the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and to know in depth the circle of writers, artists and educators who lived together in the town of Concord (Massachusetts) in the period that goes from 1830 until the Civil War , and whose works are considered the beginning of independent American literature. Although Emerson was innovative in the literary field, his concepts were influenced by texts of antiquity (the philosophy of Plato, the Persian poets, and spiritual ideas from works such as the Mahabharata).

Transcendentalism was a radical movement that threatened established religion and government, calling for a reform of the basic ideas on which the new America was founded half a century after the Thirteen Colonies Revolution. These concepts, along with Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible, the cadences of which are a distinctive feature of American literature, are the basis of a tradition that follows a common line from Whitman, Fuller, Dickinson, Melville and Hawthorne, passing by Faulkner and the southern writers, Philip Roth and the American Jewish writers, the Haarlem Renaissance, James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Ellison, up to Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen or Rebecca Solnit.

When translating a text, it is essential that the translator is able to optimize each phase of the process. This seminar will address a series of strategies to improve the use of time and resources during the translation and revision process: marking options and doubts during translation in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the revision; use keyboard shortcuts to save precious seconds and not depend on the mouse (ergonomics); when it is reasonable to resort to resources and when it is preferable not to do so, and which resources will return the best solution investing the least time.

In a book there are two raw materials: ideas and language. The translator—and other professionals—is trained to master both and, therefore, can perform various functions within the editorial process. That requires, more than knowledge, being able to adopt different perspectives of the text and, also, of the colleagues, the process and, even, the industry. Do you know, as a translator, in which phase of the editorial process you are? Are you sure you understand the difference between translating and proofreading a translation? Would you like to be a table editor? Do you think you can be a proofreader? What do you know about layout? Could you coordinate 10 or 12 people to work on the same book? Translator training is an open door to various functions; they are not the same, but they are rooted in the same knowledge and share similar interests.

Traditionally, the only way that book translators had to practice the profession was through Spanish publishing houses. However, globalization, the expansion of several multinationals dedicated to the book business and new technologies have opened up a range of new job options that allow us to dedicate ourselves to translation without depending exclusively on Spanish publishers.
The objective of the conference is to analyse what these options are and the main advantages and disadvantages of each one.

The Final Work must demonstrate the intellectual maturity of the student and put into practice the knowledge acquired throughout the course. This work will be supervised by a teacher and will be essential to pass the Course with the final grade being out of 10.

The theme must fit one or more of the following lines:

• Translation history.
• Synchronous or diachronic studies of translations.
• Proposals for unpublished translations in Spanish or old texts with justification of their literary interest.
• Rhetoric and translation.
• Translation theory.