Objectives

French Language Mediation and Translation

The course aims at:

1. Developing skills of oral and written communication in a professional environment (international enterprises and organizations).
2. Analysing the main characteristics of French Specialised Texts (especially Legal texts) with a special focus on terminology and grammatical structures.
3. Introducing the most common methods and approaches used in the specialised Translation in order to form their own understanding of theoretical principles and assess and apply them to their work.
4. Developing awareness of cultural differences with a special focus on language strategies facilitating cross-cultural communication.
5. Training the students in techniques and tools used in the specialised translation field (comparison of parallel texts, terminological data bases, corpora etc.)
6. Developing students’ critical thinking and research skills related to the field of French Specialised Texts.

Prerequisites
Students should have knowledge of French at B2/ C1 level of language competence: the exam will take place in French.

Course Syllabus

The course is designed to provide students with theoretical and practical knowledge and skills related to the French specialised texts (especially Legal texts) and to the problems of transposition, transfer and mediation in the translation process.

Starting from an analysis of the organizational structure and lexico-semantic features of a specialised discourse, a special attention is also paid to the various analytical approaches, methods and tools relevant to the field of specialised translation, with a special focus on the textual features and pragmatic implications of the cultural interaction.

Students shall also achieve full mastery of the technical and interpretational tools associated with specialised translation (i.e. analyse of parallel texts, terminological databases) in order to develop their knowledge and understanding of specialised translation as a cross-cultural communication.


Reference texts

Claude Bocquet (2008) : La traduction juridique. Fondement et méthode, Collection Traducto. Bruxelles: De Boeck.
Cornu, Gérard (1990) : Linguistique juridique, Paris : Montchrestien.
Guidère, Mathieu (2008): Introduction à la traductologie. Penser la traduction: hier, aujourd'hui, demain. Louvain: Editions De Boeck, coll. "Traducto".
Lerat, Pierre (2007) : Vocabulaire du juriste débutant. Paris: Ellipses.



Teaching methods

This course is based on learner-centred objectives and uses deductive and inductive methods.

Deductive methods are meant to show students lexical, syntactic and textual features of specialized discourse and to consolidate their techniques and strategies in translating cultural elements.

Inductive methods will encourage students to use terminological databases aiming at developing their critical and autonomous learning skills: text analysis, strategy discussion, research methods, project based learning (PBL), corpus based comparison etc.

 

Learning assessment methods

The final exam includes two parts: an oral presentation and a written exam.

For the oral exam, each student will compile a corpus of comparable texts (English-French, 4 000 words) and will comment on the lexical, syntactical and pragmatic features of the specialised discourses with a special focus on the transfer techniques from English into French. The mark obtained with this work will be the basis for the final mark.

For the written exam, students will be asked to translate a medium length text (around 250 words) from English into French, to argue about some translation problems arisen from the text and to justify their final choices. Students will work on a computer equipped with Internet connection, so as to reproduce the effective environment and technical tools usually available to a translator.


More Information

At the end of the course, the students will be able to:

- communicate effectively and fluently in speech and writing of a French specialised text (especially legal text);
- identify and interpret textual and cultural features of the specialised texts;
- identify and use the most appropriate strategies for managing translation in written documents;
- use their translator communicative competence (pragmatic knowledge and documentation skills) in giving and supporting their translation choices;
- develop a critical understanding of issues and approaches used in specialised texts translation;
- demonstrate increased awareness of cross-cultural mediation skills in specialised translation.