News and Media Translation

This course focuses on translating news articles, editorials, or opinion pieces from Japanese into English and vice versa. It aims to help participants gain a better understanding of how news stories are structured, how to write clearly and concisely in English and Japanese, and what role translation plays in the media landscape today. In this age of the internet and social networking, we increasingly face the need to write with brevity to get our meaning across to a broad spectrum of readers. This is true of writing skills for translators. The journalistic style of writing – simple and easy-to-read – is a good way to improve conciseness in your writing. As they say, there is no "correct" answer when it comes to translation. There are only "better" ways to render an idea expressed in one language into an equivalent in another. We will learn this basic tenet of translation through the lens of journalistic writing. The course is designed for those aspiring translators who hope to improve their overall writing skills and are interested in translation in journalism. The course involves a variety of translation and reading assignments inside and outside of the classroom and requires active participation of students in group discussions.

1. Understand news translation in Japanese and English.
2. Improve text analysis skill.
3. Build up translation and overall writing skills in both languages.

Those who has at least the intermediate to advanced levels of English language skills (for JP people) or equivalent levels of JP language skills (for those non-JP people); or have some translation experience (but not a must).

No required textbook

Faculty