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Welcome to this Online Translation Course for DCS bilingual staff. We appreciate your dedication to your jobs and desire to improve your performance, and are committed to providing you with practical tools which will help you to deepen your knowledge and sharpen your translation skills. This course will be different than the first one we had together in Salem in 2010 in several ways. Most obviously, the online format means that we will not be meeting in person at specific hours, which will require that you organize your schedule and allocate sufficient time each week to reading and studying each lesson as well to completing the written activities and participating in the online forums. In addition, our focus this time will be on Spanish to English translation, as this is what is most needed of you in your current positions. The course material will consist of practical guidance, relevant comparative grammar, and useful theoretical tools to approach translating the types of documents that you might expect to encounter in your work.
Schedule
The course will have a duration of eight consecutive weeks, with each week beginning on a Monday and ending on a Friday. Week One will be September 26th - 30th and Week Eight will be November 14th - 18th. Each Monday, the lesson material for that week will be available on the Online Course system. You will always be able to access the lesson material of previous weeks, but lessons that are further along in the course than the week you are currently on will not be available. Each lesson will become available the week it is to be studied so long as the student has satisfactorily completed the comprehension questions and written activities from the previous lesson and achieved a passing score.
Organization of the Course Material
The course will be divided into three parts, each with its own focus. In Part One (Lessons 1 - 3), we will focus on providing an introduction to fundamental concepts in translation and guidelines for translating. In Part Two (Lesson 4 & 5), we will turn our attention to important grammar topics that will help us to improve our accuracy in translating. Finally, in Part Three (Lessons 6 & 7), we will go deeper into some theoretical concepts that will aid in finding equivalent words and phrases in the target language. The material for the last lesson will be tailored to meet your needs based on our observations of the parts of translation that pose the biggest challenges for you.
If you have any questions or comments regarding any of these sections, please post them here.