Hi today. I want to talk to you guys about studying
Translation at University
I've already made a video about studying English language and culture at Leiden University
Which you can watch right here in this video will kind of be a sequel to that one because this time I'll be talking about
My masters so took three years to my bachelor's degree, and I was planning on then doing one year of
Translation and literature courses for my masters because of several Mishaps and me missing a letter and things like that
I was too late to sign up for the translation program fortunately university in the netherlands isn't too expensive it's about
1700 Euros a year so I decided to do a full year of
Literature classes and then for the next year sign up for translation
I don't think I was quite ready to be done with university yet
so after a year of doing
Literature courses which felt fairly similar to what I've been doing in the last year of my bachelor's degree
I finally got to take my first translation courses so for the first semester had several different courses and they were kind of split between
legal and literary translation
So legal would mostly be legal documents medical documents forms and websites and then literary translation would be
Fiction and poetry they never made us do both
So we could discover what we wanted basically the general idea seems to be that if you want an actual job in real life you
Should do legal translation, but I really didn't like legal translation
It's a lot more of like learning all these terms that you need to know and then applying them and I felt like literary translation
Was a lot more of like this complicated puzzle
And it was so much more fun to me so the second semester when he had to make a decision
I decided to go with literary translation. We had several speakers who worked in translation
Come in and talk to us and mostly what they would say was oh you think you can do this as a full-time job?
Good luck!
Not exactly the thing you want to hear the year before
you need to find a job
We got to ask questions about things such as how much should you charge for translation and how do the contracts work. Okay
So I'll go through some of the things we did during our classes
We did group translations where we all [got] a printout of the same website
I think we did one for our university website when we were told to translate it
We did translations
from English dutch and dutch to English and then we had to kind of present our choices because one of the most important things
About translating and learning the process of translation is being able to explain. Why you made these choices
I think one of the first things we had to do was a back
Translation for the first page of the Catcher in the rye. We got four different dutch
translations from
Different time periods it translated back into English and then kind of decide the time frame so which one was the oldest and which one was
the Most Modern
translation for one course every week someone got to select a piece of text from their favorite book or maybe their favorite poem and then
They could assign that to the rest of the class and then next week, we would go through it
I think I picked a section of like the last one or two pages from looking for Alaska
And it was so much fun to see people pick out bits from their favorite book and you could tell they knew a lot more
about it than we did when we were translating we encountered lots of
Accents what very often happens especially when it comes to British lit there will be one characters like the caretaker
Or the farm boy, and he will have a very specific
Dialect or a very specific region to go show you that he's not of the same class
But then how do you translate that for example into dutch?
You can't just take a farmer's accent and put that on that character because it would sound absolutely ridiculous
so what I found funny was that what happens quite a lot is you make up your own
Accent the kind of will give people the same feeling for that character
But that is not specifically picked from a region in the netherlands
Which is kind of what I feel like happened with hagrid and Harry Potter
Another favorite was when someone picked a bit from the hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy to translate yeah
Good luck translating the ravenous Bugblatter beast
of troll and then you have poetry and song lyrics and trust me it can take about five hours to
Translate a 10 line poem. Do you wanna keep the rhythm the rhyme the puns the
Meaning or maybe just a general feeling of the poem and there are always multiple versions that were really good
But completely different there aren't really any like specific
Rules, but everyone had their own preference for translating certain
Cultural things for example in a children's book if kids go have some fish and chips in Dutch
Would you then translate that as them going to have fries with Mayonnaise?
Because for all the kids know the book could be set in the netherlands
or do you want to kind of teach them about different cultures and leave the fish and chips in then at the end of the
Year, we had to write a thesis
And I decided to write mine on big surprise the fault in our stars by John Green
I thought this was a particularly interesting book because
It's written in English about American teenagers by an author who was writing it while he wasn't other lens
And it includes a bit where the teenagers go to amsterdam and talk to dutch people who are speaking English
but also mentioned dutch people speaking dutch
So I thought that'd be quite a fun challenge
What I did was I selected a bit from the part where there in Amsterdam
I hadn't read the actual dutch translation yet
So I made my own translation explained all my choices then read the dutch translation and compared both of our versions
It was difficult because there were some parts where I felt like I had more
Knowledge because I've been just watching John Green's videos for forever
And I've had the opportunity to hear him talk about it quite a lot so should I take those things into consideration?
Or should I just pretend that I don't know though. That was kind of a really fun
But stressful adventure when I started my first translation courses I immediately
Noticed kind of a big change because I never used to speak up in class and then when I started my translation classes
I had to stop myself from speaking up because there were all these things that I felt like I could contribute to the class or
That I just found so interesting to talk about so I know that having a career in translation is hard
But comparing my year of studying literature for my masters and then the year of doing translation
I feel like by switching it up and picking something different than what I did during my bachelor's was such a good decision
it's kind of a chance to go into something that's still related to what you did doing your bachelor's
But to kind of discover new things so for those of you
Don't know. I am currently working at a publishing company, and I'm not doing any translation
I'm doing social Media and video stuff
But I do want to make it a goal to in my free time keep practicing
Translation because you definitely need lots and lots of practice, and I really hope that at some point in the future
I will be able to translate a book okay
I hope I kind of answered most of the questions
That you guys had if you have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments
And I will talk to you guys later!
[Speaking dutch]