Course: HUMN 340: Translation Studies
Faculty: Katie Faull
DP&S liaison: Diane Jakacki
Semester and Year: Fall 2016
Professor Katie Faull was interested in having students in her Translation Studies class think differently about how we negotiate translated works. Working with Diane Jakacki, Faull had her students work in TEI text encoding within a Versioning Machine interface to produce exercises presenting translations of short literary works and incorporating critical annotations and glosses.
Students experimented with different approaches to translation: between languages as well as examining how cultural and temporal experience can affect the process of translation. The image below shows the Versioning Machine interface and a poem written by the 19th century Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki, translated from Japanese into Romaji and English.
The Versioning Machine is an open-source “framework and an interface for displaying multiple versions of text encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, and is P5 compatible. While the VM provides for features typically found in critical editions, such as annotation and introductory material, it also takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by electronic publication to allow for the comparison diplomatic versions of witnesses, and the ability to easily compare an image of the manuscript with a diplomatic version.” (Versioning Machine website) Students learned basic TEI tags to present and annotate their translated texts. The code snippet below shows the marked-up text for Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII” in Spanish, Italian, French, and English.
