The School of Letters & Tongues · language, literature & writing
Translation & Interpretation
The discipline of saying it again in another language — faithfully, idiomatically, and on deadline.
Word-for-word or sense-for-sense — the choices every translator makes, practiced on real texts.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — What Translation Is
Word-for-word and sense-for-sense · Skopos: translating for a purpose · A short history, Jerome to now
Unit II — The Translator's Decisions
Register and tone · Idioms and metaphor · What to do with untranslatables
Unit III — Practice Across Text Types
News and technical prose · Marketing and transcreation · Legal and medical texts, where accuracy is non-negotiable
Unit IV — Quality and Ethics
Revision and back-translation · Style guides and glossaries · Ethics, credit, and the translator's name
Voice, rhythm, and the thousand small betrayals — translating prose and poetry that deserve it.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — The Translator as Writer
The author's voice and yours · Reading like a translator · Comparing published translations of one page
Unit II — Prose
Rhythm and sentence shape across languages · Dialogue and dialect · Culture-bound detail: gloss, keep, or cut
Unit III — Poetry
What survives: sound, image, or sense · Meter and rhyme decisions · From prose crib to finished poem
Unit IV — The Profession
Rights and contracts · Pitching a translation to publishers · The translator's note
Listening, holding, and re-speaking — the working modes of spoken-language interpreting, drilled honestly.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Foundations
Modes: consecutive, simultaneous, sight · Memory and active-listening exercises · The interpreter's code of ethics
Unit II — Consecutive
Note-taking symbols and structure · Chunking and reformulation · Practice with recorded speeches
Unit III — Simultaneous
Shadowing · Managing lag · Booth technique and stamina
Unit IV — Settings
Community and medical interpreting · Court interpreting · Conference work and preparation
Neural machine translation, translation memories, and post-editing — the tools, minus the hype.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~14 hours
Unit I — How Machine Translation Works
Rule-based to neural: a short history · What neural systems get right and wrong · Evaluating output: fluency versus accuracy
Unit II — The Translator's Workbench
Translation memories · Termbases and glossaries · Alignment and concordance
Unit III — Post-Editing
Light and full post-editing · Common machine-translation error patterns · Speed without lowered standards
Two lines, six seconds — translating film and television inside the tightest constraints in the trade.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~16 hours
Unit I — The Constraints
Characters per line, seconds per subtitle · Reading speed and the viewer's eye · Condensation techniques
Unit II — The Craft
Segmenting speech · Dialect, profanity, and register on screen · Songs, signs, and on-screen text
Unit III — Dubbing and Access
Dubbing and lip-sync basics · Captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers · A subtitled scene, start to finish