This course trains students in the practice of translating Arabic texts from a wide variety of genres into English. Attention will be given to both theoretical and practical problems of translation for research and professional ends.

"What is a Classic?" asks what goes into the making of a classic text. It focuses on four, monumental poems from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Gilgamesh, which are discussed through comparison across traditions, ranging as far as Chinese poetry. Students will consider possible definitions and constituents of a classic, while also reflecting on the processes of chance, valorization, and exclusion that go into the formation of a canon. Topics will include transmission, commentary, translation, religion, race, colonization, empire, and world literature.

Global publishing today - both book and digital - is one of the major ways that ideas and culture, hegemony and resistance, all cross borders. Essential to its effects are research, translation, media, and migration. How has the publishing industry contributed to "thinking globally" and led to widespread cultural transformations? In what ways and to what extent has it remained national or regional, focusing largely on the US and Europe? How are current crises around race, economics, and global health affecting the industry today? This course takes both a theoretical and also a more practical look at these and related questions.

This course probes the intersection of world literature and translation, in relation to conditions of multilingualism, processes of cultural transfer, and the consolidation/contestation of national literary traditions. In reading key texts from the debates around the concept and practice of world literature, we will ask whether its universalizing drive can be reconciled with literary/scholarly investments in inaccessibility, locality, and specificity, and what role translation plays in these formations. Throughout, we will consider the implications of these debates for our own work as scholars.

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.

This course aims to improve conversation skills in ASL, review and refine knowledge of basic grammar, broaden vocabulary, develop ASL-English translation skills, and increase awareness of Deaf culture. Students will develop their ASL skills through interactive activities in class and interacting with Deaf people out of class.

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 will provide an in-depth study of the Machine Translation paradigms (direct, transfer, statistical/example, interlingua and neural network) 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. Linguistic variation across languages and its impact on computational models will be presented. Projects will involve implementing speech/text translation components, identifying their limitations and suggesting improvements.

Academic work in disciplines across the humanities and humanistic social sciences are fueled in part by practices of translation, and many disciplines are moving toward a consideration of translation as scholarship in its own right. Yet few graduate students are trained practices of translation, either within their discipline or as an interdisciplinary node of intellectual engagement. This graduate translation workshop aims to help students from various departments hone a practice of translation that can stand on its own as a scholarly endeavor, while also deepening and enriching the other forms of research and writing in which they engage.