Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

The focus of this course will be on Italian women writers from the early 20th century to the present day. We will work with a mix of voices from the established canon, such as Grazia Deledda and Natalia Ginzburg, and those emerging in more recent years and who write from a culturally and linguistically hybrid perspective, such as Igiaba Scego and Ornella Vorpsi. Though the bulk of the translation will be out of Italian, we will also consider published English translations of these authors and revert them into Italian for the purpose of deepening the understanding of linguistic structures and more nuanced questions of translation.

Is translation possible without losing something of the original? Can cultures be translated or appropriated? Is a universal language possible, or even desirable? Can a computer be trained to translate more effectively than a human? This course will explore the limits, uses, and abuses of translation and multilingual difference through readings and discussions of myths, case studies, and theories of translation, with a focus on the German context. We will acquaint ourselves with many different perspectives on translation and untranslatability, as well as developing our own understandings of these problems.

This course offers intensive practice in American Sign Langauge (ASL) through learning specialized vocabulary, analyzing grammar, developing ASL-English translation skills, and discussing ASL literary works and Deaf culture.

The course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course introduces philosophical and intellectual tradition of Classical India through readings selected from Sanskrit texts belonging to different branches of Indian thought. This is primarily a reading course. It covers a wide range of passages excerpted from major works of various schools of Indian philosophy and pre-philosophical reflections. Sanskrit texts are supplemented by a selection of secondary literature to help students situate the works in the intellectual and cultural context of pre-modern South Asia.

This course is an introduction to the practice of literary translation from Spanish to English, with a focus on fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. After a series of translation exercises, each student will select an author and work to be translated as the central project for the class, and will embark on the process of revising successive drafts. Close reading of the Spanish texts is required, as is a deep engagement with the translations of fellow students. Subjects of discussion will include style, context, the conventions of contemporary translation, and the re translation of classics.

This course will provide an in-depth study of Machine Translation paradigms used in state-of-the-art speech-to-speech and text-based MT systems, from computational and linguistic perspectives. Techniques for processing human languages (morphological analysis, tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, and language generation) will be discussed with hands-on, in-class exercises. Linguistic variation and its impact on computational models will be presented. Term projects will involve implementing speech/text translation components, identifying their limitations and suggesting improvements or any topic of relevance to language processing.

Translation is at the core of our engagement with China, Japan, and Korea. From translations of the classics to contemporary literature, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to cross-cultural references in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on what "translation" of "original works" means in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.