Translation and Interpreting MA

These modules centre on developing your skills in public service interpreting as well as in formal conference scenarios in both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting modes. Over the course of the year, you will build skills in areas such as information transfer, formal and informal speech, body language and voice, etiquette, glossary building, concentration, memory, message analysis and split attention, as well as familiarise yourself with note-taking techniques in dialogue and consecutive interpreting, and develop the complex multi-tasking skills required for public service, consecutive, and booth-based simultaneous interpreting in professional contexts.

This module equips you with a range of essential skills needed to succeed in the interpreting profession. The module is delivered in parallel to the language-specific Chinese / French / German / Italian / Spanish Interpreting module and is designed to complement your acquisition of practical, language-specific interpreting skills through conceptual knowledge development, discussion, and practical implementation in simulated professional scenarios. You'll be guided through the principles, strategies, and skills involved in Public Service and Conference Interpreting, and learning activities will enable you to reflect on your practice, analyse the quality of your performance, and prepare for a career in a wide range professional, cultural, and social settings.

The module is delivered in our bespoke interpreting suites through seminars and workshops, supervised as well as student-led interpreting lab practice, mock conferences, and other situated learning activities. This module scaffolds and facilitates your learning journey on the MA Translation and Interpreting through the clear setting of intermediate goals, checking progress at regular intervals, keeping a reflective journal, and working closely with peers on giving and receiving feedback.

This module offers practical, language-specific translation training, utilising a wide range of specialist texts of the kind you will be expected to handle in a professional context. You'll encounter a wide variety of text types and, in terms of subject area, will typically cover material from an equally wide variety of contexts, such as international and government institutions, economics, finance, business, politics and law, as well as technical and scientific fields such as medicine, pharmacology, engineering, IT, technical product development and the natural and applied sciences. While you will be trained to translate specialised material both into and out of your mother tongue, the focus of assessment on this modules primarily lies on ‘direct’ (into mother tongue/language of habitual use) translation.

Language-specific translation training on his module is complemented and supported by weekly all-cohort, interactive lectures covering a range of conceptual and strategic dimensions of translation in a professional context.

This module equips you with a wide range of practice-oriented skills needed to succeed in the language services industry. The module is delivered in parallel to the Chinese / French / German / Italian / Spanish Specialised Translation module and is designed to complement your acquisition of language-specific translation skills through the holistic development of Computer-assisted Translation and Terminology Management, Project Management, and Quality Assurance skills sets and their application in an extended, multilingual Simulated Translation Bureau (STB). The module fosters and hones high-level skills such as teamwork, professionalism, time-management, self-motivation, and reflective practice, as well as language industry-specific skills such as the confident and effective handling of translation technology in real-world contexts; sales, client, and vendor management; translation project and workflow management across multilingual teams; terminology research and management; translation; transcreation; revision and quality assurance; and final delivery and after-sales tasks.

You'll be guided through the skills acquisition process and the STB by a team of specialist tutors. Learning activities will enable you to reflect on your practice, analyse the quality of your performance, and prepare for a career in a wide range professional, cultural, and social settings. The module benefits from access to a range of specialist software packages and is delivered through interactive seminars, supervised as well as student-led translation labs, simulations, and other situated learning activities. The module scaffolds and facilitates your learning journey on the MA Specialised Translation and MA Translation and Interpreting by consolidating and complementing learning from a range of other modules in a simulated professional setting.

This module offers a range of seminars and workshops designed to prepare you for your working lives as translators and interpreters, either in-house or freelance, and is delivered by both academic staff and external speakers with expert knowledge and relevant experience in a range of industry-relevant fields.

Workshops include, for example, marketing yourself as a freelance translator or interpreter, ethics and professionality, working for international organisations, continuing professional development and working for agencies. The skills, concepts and knowledge that support future employability and reflective practice will be addressed from both a conceptual and practical standpoint.

The MA Interpreting Project consists of individual study for and completion of an extended piece of analysis on your own performance in fulfilling an interpretation task from initial research and glossary building, text analysis, and giving an interpretation, to a final evaluation of the interpreting quality. The module is delivered through a series of project workshops covering aspects of interpreting theory and text analysis and practical advice on how to complete the project. There is also individual supervision.

Alternatively, you can do an MA Translation Project. The module consists of individual study for and completion of an extended piece of translation, accompanied by an analytic commentary and a set of annotations on the translation process. The module is delivered through a series of workshops linked to online study blocks covering aspects of translation theory and text analysis as well as practical advice on how to complete the Project. You'll also receive individual Project supervision over the course of the module.

You can also choose to do an MA Dissertation. This is the development, execution, and writing-up of an independent research project on a topic of your choice. You'll attend regular research seminars. Individual supervision will provide topic-specific guidance.

This module examines the ways in which translation, conceived as a cultural practice, can be understood within diverse linguistic, social, professional and historical contexts.

It invites you to consider not only the immediate cultural implications of translating between two cultural contexts, but also interrogates the notion that translators are culturally neutral or independent of the processes in which they engage. The concept of cultural practice is also investigated by looking inwards towards the professional contexts of translation in different societies over history, examining the cultures of the translation profession and how these cultures have impacted on the practice of translation.

The module seeks to provide the conceptual underpinning that equips students with critical reflective insight into their own translation practice through exploring a range of culturally inflected texts and textual practices, both written and oral.

This module considers current theories and practices of information processing, communication and interpretation and their relevance to global co-operation. It provides the knowledge and competencies needed to operate successfully in multi-cultural environments and examines, simulates and critically evaluates the techniques and strategies required to facilitate global bilingual / lingua franca advocacy and collaboration. It covers issues such as framing and reframing, active listening, and metacommunication. It also examines the ethical dimensions and challenges of international liaison.

This module aims to develop a critical understanding of the interaction between language, discourse, and power as it is projected in an institutional communication context. The module is designed to help linguists and communicators to analyse a number of social interactions (speeches, interviews, etc.) and institutional discourses (European Union and United Nations), and to reflect on their own discourse building competences in a professional institutional context. The module supports linguists and communicators in understanding how institutional narratives are created and developed.