 Hello everybody. Welcome to an MA translation and MA linguistics taster lesson. My name is Nana Satoros-Berg. I'm head of School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. I'm also chair of Center for Translation Studies. And today I'm going to provide you a 10-minute taster lesson on MA translation. A very simple question. What is translation? So when you start studying with us, I will ask you this question. Because many people think, oh, what is translation? It's so simple to answer. This is a very easy answer, you know, easy question to answer. But actually, in the fact, it's not so easy. When you study translation studies, when we talk about what translation studies is or what translation is, we'll start talking about Roman Jakobson. And Roman Jakobson, he was a scholar of linguistics, and he made a kind of definition of what translation is. He divided translation into three categories. One, interlingual translation. Two, interlingual translation. And three, intersemiotic translation. First one, intra-lingual translation. What does it mean? Let's think about in the context of Japanese, because I'm from Japan, and my native language is Japanese. So in the Japanese context, when we talk about intra-lingual translation, for example, it's translation from standard Japanese, like Tokyo Direct is considered as standard Japanese, to translate it into let's say Osaka dialect. So those two languages are both Japanese, but considered as a very different type of Japanese. And so you could translate from Tokyo Direct into Osaka Direct. This is a kind of interlingual translation. Second one is interlingual translation. This is normally widely considered as translation. Like this is translating from English into Chinese or translating from Arabic into English. And the third one, intersemiotic translation. So you would translate the different medium into different medium. What does it mean? For example, you translate from a novel into film. And this is the intersemiotic translation. So if you are interested in this Roman Jacobson's definition of translation, please have a look at this paper. Of course, this paper was written in 1959. Translation Studies scholars developed definition or notion of translation more, you know, widely beyond these, but this is the starting point when we talk about translation studies. So next one, very simple translation practice, because I don't know what kind of languages you can speak, but I believe you can read English. That's why I decided to bring this practice today. So there is a photo here. And you can see maybe there are two elephants and standing on the floor. Right, you can see that. So can you please translate this photo into a text? You can describe anyways, but you see this photo as original. And then you need to translate this photo into a text to describe what you see. Yum. Because I cannot talk to the audience. So could you please translate this photo into Chinese? Into English, please, because I don't understand Chinese. Elephant. Yes. In the other one. Sentence, please, could you make a sentence to describe this photo? This is there are two elephants and one small. Okay, thank you very much. I think it's a correct answer. Okay, so in the classroom, I asked this question to like 20 students. And normally all students answer differently. Okay, and let's see the examples of answers. One big elephant and one small elephant, a purple lego animal and the pink lego animal, brother elephant and sister elephant, father elephant is protecting his daughter while she's asleep, lovely lego in someone's living room. So no, no, no, no. These are all translations of this photo. Yum, do you think there is any wrong answer? Any, any wrong answer? They're all acceptable, I think. Exactly. They're all correct. But they are looking at this photo from a different perspective. They interpret, they understand this photo differently. Why? Because they have a different perspective. They have a different views of what they are interested in through this photo is different. Right. So what I want to say here is that if there are 10 translators, there are 10 kinds of translations. It means it doesn't mean so that means that there is no superior, great translation in this world. So if you want to translate something, there are various ways of translating the original. How you want to translate is up to you in principle. But this is where you can learn theories, methodologies, and various types of practice to make your own best translation. I've got only 10 minutes, so my practice must be very short. So the final slide, if you come to Suwa Seme Translation Program, you can learn and discuss theory, methods, and the practice of translation beyond Western-oriented discourse, okay? As a practical translation, we offer Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Suwahili, and Persian. We don't offer any sort of Western language pair. It's all beyond Western languages. And you can learn any aspects of practical translation, including language and culture and technology. So if you want to be a translator, it is very important to learn how to use, for example, machine translation. And so you can learn all these kinds of practical translations if you come to our MA translation program. And together with extremely multi-lingual and the multi-cultural staff and students, you can learn MA translation. It is extremely important for you to be in the location like Suwa's, because in London, you know, people speak more than 400 languages in London. And at Suwa's, we offer more than 20 languages. And most of staff are at least bilingual, but many staff can speak four to ten languages. It's a fantastic place to learn MA translation. I'm going to stop here, because I tend to speak too much always. And I know this was too short, but if you're interested in our MA translation program, please get in touch with me. Also, we have this Center for Translation Studies. So if you Google Center for Translation Studies, you can see our activities. Thank you very much. Dan, I was a bit too fast to speak, but... That was fantastic, Nana. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. A really interesting insight into translation here at Suwa's. I particularly enjoy using the Lego elephants, and that's a fantastic question to ask. It's a really good way for us to think about translation. Thank you. So I will just say as well that if anyone, as a reminder, if you do have any questions, please do feel free to use the question answer box, and we'll make sure that we get those answered for you during the session. And just to add as well, we've been joined by a student ambassador. So if you have any questions that are about the more student perspective of studying at Suwa's, we can look at answering those for you as well. I now invite Yan to share his screen and his slides and to talk to you further. Thank you very much, Dan. Let me share my screen with you all. Hello. Welcome to Suwa's, and welcome to our Suwa's postgraduate master's session at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. My name is Yan Zhang. I'm a senior lecturer in linguistics and languages of China. I also work as program convener for MA linguistics and MA in linguistics and in intensive language. So what I have prepared for you today first is some very general introduction about Suwa's, especially about our School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. And because of the time constraint, I'll be rather quick. So this is our school with the tradition, with this range of languages, and with our UK's oldest linguistics department, as well as both me and Anna are working as well. And also we have our, we pride ourselves with our endangered language archive, and we have students and staff from many different countries. And we have expertise in some of the world's key regions in terms of language. So this is School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. There are these small details. And also I want to add that our MA in linguistics program is also a pathway which is called language documentation description, arguably the only one available in this country. Yeah. But if we want some descriptions about our department and about what we do, it's a bunch of linguists working at Suwa's. Usually we would come up with this first description is that we explore linguistic diversity through the study of language. But today I have prepared a special menu for you, because I've been working all day. In fact, I wanted to think about some specific topics that I want to provide to you. And if you come to our other sessions, then our other colleagues will give you some other recipes to look at. So I want to talk about how we explore linguistic diversity through the study of semantics. I have here a special module in mind for those of you who have studied semantics before and how we make a difference at Suwa's. And for those of you who have never studied semantics or even linguistics, it doesn't matter because we'll start from scratch and we'll teach you how to deal with the study of meaning in different languages. So here I'm referring to this special module on semantics which starts without assuming too much knowledge about the discipline. And then you also have another module to start with that is called Minion Interpretation for Term 1. And this one is in fact for Term 2 that I'm teaching. But we'll quickly go through the basics of formal semantics in our module for the first three or four weeks. And then we move on to look at a range of topics. So let me give you this outline so that I hope I can impress you with the uniqueness of our syllabus. So for example, the first four weeks will be related to painting students with the basics of modern semantics. That is about sentential semantics, sense and reference, reference and denotation, proposition truth, etc. And then we deal with the basic logics and the representation and interpretation issues. And then we talk about semantic type theory, lambda abstraction, reduction, and generalized quantifier theory. So left column constitute the warmup. I should say that is what you, some of you may have already studied in your bachelor time. And then we move on to something more unique of our own that I've been developing these years. Week five will be devoted to the study of index codes. You know that if we have dealt with axis and index codes, you know that there's a pragmatic parameter that is usually talked about in textbooks. But here we want to introduce the semantic dimension, which is done more regress and which nicely complements with the content of the past four weeks. How we introduce index codes into the study of formal meaning. And then in week six, I treat the varieties of NP interpretation, which is not usually covered in detail in any textbooks. How do we interpret notions such as deafness, definiteness, indefiniteness, attributiveness, uniqueness, specificity and non-specificity, generics, etc. And we pay more attention to encouraging students, inviting them to look at their own language, look at the language they are studying in intensity, to see how these semantic notions can be manifested in these different languages and what are their uniqueness and how way in return can incorporate them into our theorization and into our more generic discussion into our, what I would like to call semantic botany studies. That is, you look at various types of meaning and you try to give them proper treatments. And then week seven is devoted to the study of literal meaning itself, because I want to identify a lot of gaps in the literal meaning and that can lead us to play into the recent debate about contextualism versus semantic minimalism. So later today, I will provide some more slides about this content because I think this part is more accessible. And then in week eight, that's my favorite topic is about conditionals and contractuals. We treat conditionals as one interesting meeting point where in which many complicated semantic notions can be drawn and can be implemented to the study of this sophisticated phenomenon of conditionals. And we look at conditionals worldwide, that is, in what other languages and how these conditionals can have different biases. And in this sense, then contractuals may even more interesting. And week nine is about plurals. And we know that plural is always a thorny issue in semantics. And then finally, we look at semantics and primantics for the line, which is the treatment of presupposition, which posts a vast literature that nobody can claim to have read fully. So this is the outline, and I hope that you find it interesting. But then I can quickly talk for another five minutes about this special topic that we treat in week seven, that is called literal meaning and next picture. We probably all know what literal meaning is, but then it mainly refers to a sentence meaning. So the meaning of a sentence according to the modern semantic point of view is this truth conditions. And we would like to open up this question, the recent question, the debate is whether truth value can be established at the sentence level or not. If it cannot, then we can't claim that we are being full fledged literal meaning and sentence level. If that is the case, then we want to access contextual information. We want, we need expertise from mathematics in order to sort out the full fledged literal meaning. That in fact, can be a medical claim because it seems to endanger the foundation of modern semantics. Of course, that means that semantics can never be autonomous. It cannot stand alone because you can't even establish truth values at the level of sentence. So this leads to interesting claims. We can look at a range of cases, like the index codes we have already mentioned, in ways that sentential meaning can be incomplete and how they exhibit themselves in different languages. So we look at some examples. It'll be interesting. Examples like we talk, it is raining, I had Christmas turkey, I learned syntax. Examples like these can seem to be quite self-contained in terms of syntax. They're complete. There's nothing wrong with meaning, nothing wrong with grammar. They can't be more complete in the sense. But in fact, from semantic point of view and from the point of view of establishing truth values, we'll say that all of them are semantically undetermined. They're incomplete. Because when you say, we thought, I want to ask, and where? It is raining. Well, you probably mean it is raining here and now, but then I may be telling you this sentence over my mobile phone. Then you'll have to get it as it is raining over there. That's where the person is making the phone call, probably from London, while the receiver is somewhere in Tokyo, for example. And I had Christmas turkey. But when? Last year or this year? In fact, this year, I couldn't add Christmas turkey. Well, I learned syntax. Again, where does it make a difference? Did you learn it at MIT or not? Well, all these can be interesting. And you may start to get the feeling that every sentence can be undetermined in this way or that. And that gives rise to a particular claim called indexicalism. Those people claim that wherever you have a sentence that is undetermined in meaning, you can always posit some hidden indexical somewhere. So the sentence will appear to be a bit, I want to say, protest in the sense that you don't realize how many indices can be introduced in a simple sentence. So when you're talking about examples like your coffee is too strong, but strong for what? But he is not strong enough. Well, it depends on who is drinking it, right? He is too talkative. For what occasion? You are so nice. Well, to what extent? It tastes all the same compared to what? You can go on with all these ordinary examples. He submitted his proposal to the head. The head of what? The mayor agreed to give a talk of which city the parents decided to make the visit to the school? Well, the parents of whom? So you may start realizing that even nouns have hidden indices. And there are metonymic expressions, for example, the three wishes. Then implicitly, you are referring to the Shakespearean play, Macbeth. So all these, I give you some titles that are introduced by Jason Stanley and Zodan Sabo some time ago. And what people pose as treatments are, as I've said, hidden in indices. So sentences would look something like this. You are seeing the indices here, in parentheses. And then other people mention a whole array of other sentences. And unfortunately, they're all from English. So that invites us to look at many, many other languages, especially at souls. We love doing that. So for example, like the ones I'm showing now, right, and we find some proper place to plug in some indices or not. If you can't find any proper places, then it is hard to sort out the correct logical form for these sentences. So here are the examples which have been proposed in such a way in the hope that it will provide counter examples to semantic indexicalism, constantly at others. He ran to the cliff and jumped. Did he jump down or he's just jumping at the cliff? Sarah has a temperature, but everyone has a temperature. That's not what is meant. So what is meant here is Sarah has an unusually high temperature. It's the only person that can think. Well, what do you mean? Everyone can think, right? So this who can think has a special connotation. And the rest as well. So we have then the introduction of a new school of thought related to these examples for themselves, medical contextualism. They think that little meaning should be freely enriched. You can never plug in any indices at definite places because they are not to be found. You don't know where to plug in. And enrichment is everywhere. It is online. So this gives us contribution, controversies. And this invites us from an empirical point of view to look at a wide range of cases in many, many other examples. In many, many other languages. How do we fair, right? Then we look at examples in Burma, in Chinese, in Burmese, for example. So this is what I would usually lead our students in investigating, following these debates, but trying to look beyond English. So it started with concerns with language use and capability in verbal communication that can carry us further than the debates in the philosophy of language. So what next? What we propose to do is to look at still another theory in mathematics, which is called expenditure theory in relevance theoretic mathematics. We want it to step further. We want to identify research gaps. So we attempt to introduce a more rigorous formal characterization of explicature. But this is not an end in itself. The end is always to study a variety of data in a variety of languages. And we study the explicating process. How the undetermined sentence meaning is fleshed out? What is the process? To what extent they are linguistically guided, structurally can use to infer that the sentence is to be interpreted in this way or in other ways. And here, looking at different languages will always give us many, many happy surprises, because you don't really know this language and this special structure that can provide proper guidelines to how you enrich the sentence. So native speakers will never get any other possible but unnatural interpretations. So usually we provide a lot of references, but students are invited to take a look at some carefully chosen, selected and hopefully up-to-date ones on which they base their assignment questions. Then they design their own question and then they write up their own assignments. And then we have discussions and dialogues afterwards. So here is a list of some simple questions I give to our students, but then they are also welcome to design their own questions. And sometimes, again, they surprise me with their wonderful thoughts. So I finish at this point with my presentation so that we can leave you enough time for questions. And I wish to leave you my email address and you are always welcome to write to me for more questions. And I will always be happy to arrange talk-back discussions that I have been doing these years so that if you are interested in our program but would like to have some more clever teachings, please let me know and I can accommodate your time. I wish to make a further announcement is that our translation program is going to hold a promotion day event with the date and the time given here. So if you are interested, then please wait for our further announcements. Thank you very much. And I stopped here so that you can ask questions. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Jan. That was fantastic. A great insight there. And I've just posted both of your email addresses, Jan and Anna, into the chat. So if anyone does want to take you both up on that opportunity, please do feel free to find those email address contacts just there. Now we do have just over 10 minutes available of time left at the end. There have been one or two questions that have come in so far, which we've answered during the session. But if there is anything else you would like to ask now, for Jan or for Anna to respond to live, then please do feel free to send them into us. And while anyone thinks about doing that, I was wondering if you'd both be able just to give us a bit of an insight into the dissertation topics that students sometimes consider and sometimes they write about and do their research in for both of the courses. Would that be okay? Who'd like to start? Anna, please. Thank you. Thank you, Dan, and thank you, Jan. So if students take a translation program, they can choose either a translation project or a translation research project. Majority of students choose a translation project. That means students can choose what they want to translate and they can translate from English to any other languages that we offer or vice versa. And if it's research dissertation, they have to use theories and methodologies and to discuss around translation and its issues. So it's a proper research dissertation. If students want to, you know, pursue PhDs, then we normally recommend students to choose research dissertation rather than translation project. It's simple, but I think this explains everything. Yes. Jan, over to you. Thank you very much, Anna. So for MA linguistics dissertations, we welcome any topics so long as that falls within the expertise of me and my colleagues. But then we would usually advise our students to follow some ideas that they get from attending some particular modules that they're accepted with. So that can make an easier start. But otherwise, and Anna has already told us everything. Fantastic. So some great opportunities that are available there and thinking about potentially those who are interested in going on to do further things with their master's courses. We mentioned PhD study and PhD research, I should say. Can you think of any other opportunities that this might open students up to? So actually, SOAS produces many literary translators. And even when I talk about only Japanese into English, I know six, seven professional literary translators who publish many translations. And so I tend to have students who are interested in literary translations, but also there are many students who are interested in subtitles and translating games and so on. And you know, there are many game companies and some students get the position there, game companies and so on. Yes. Over to you, Jan. Thanks. I would say that having a MA degree is an important asset for anyone who would like to do work like language teaching. And many times if you have an MA degree, you'll be at a better position in getting yourself employed because many schools would now like their applicants to have higher qualifications. And certainly, I am also aware that many of our students are doing other works like working for companies, but then with very good background in command language and knowing the rationale of how language works, they can be more welcome. And also there are students who do professional copy editing for publishers. And these days, they can get a lot of work online because there are people who would like to have a lot of work or assistance, even on a one-to-one basis. I mean, polishing writings for others, that is quite acceptable, especially for those non-latest speakers. Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you both. We have had a question that's just come through asking about the deadline to apply for the MA translation. Do we have that data hand? I think it's the end of June. Am I right, Yam? It's normally the end of June. Yeah, it's normally the end of June. But then for last year, because of this special situation, our deadline was lifted until the end of July, if I was ever right. In general, it's the end of June. Yeah, I think for most talkmasters programs across the school, 30th of June is the main deadline there, but just wanted to double-check we didn't have any specific ones for translation. And we'll also just share in a moment's time a link to the how to apply for a master's page. So I'll pop that into the chat in just a second, and that's got some more information about deadlines and other information that you might need to know on there. And before we wrap up, I'll just give one more call for any final questions to come through. And while anyone is welcome to submit those, do either of you have any advice for someone who might be considering different master's courses at the moment and sort of how to make their application stand out as possible? I think, oh, yes, it's my microphone. I think for me what matters is passion. If you really like to translate, or if you're passionate about talking about translation, then please do apply. And you have opportunity to write a statement letter. I think that is very important point for me, because if you have a passion, if you're committed, you can learn how to translate. And that's all matters. That's my advice. Me too. I think that what we are looking for is really a strong, interesting commitment in the study of languages and linguistics, and that will have to be stated in the statement. Right. If someone doesn't mention linguistics at all, then we'll have to write back and ask, are you sure that you want to do this degree or not? Yes. We can write back. Yes, yes. Fantastic. Thank you, Bate. And our final questions come through asking about whether anyone be able to access the recording of this session. So just to confirm the recordings will, I believe, be uploaded. And there should be some information about that. I think they'll be added into a playlist onto our YouTube channel. So just keep an eye on the website and on there. If you don't see them in just over a week or so, then feel free to get in touch and we can make sure that we make the recording available to you. But that will be that. So that does bring us to the end of the session. If either of you have any parting comments, feel free now. Sure. If you have any questions, just beautifully do email me. You are always welcome. And so nice getting to see you all and thank you for coming. And hope we can be in communication more about languages, translation, and linguistics. Yes. Fantastic. Thank you, Jan. Thank you, Nana. Thank you to all of us. Thank you for your great work. See you then. See you. See you soon. Cheers, everyone. Goodbye. Take care. Bye.