Mk 12 Dr hab. Katarzyna Sokołowska Literary translation in English

The principal objective of the translation seminar is to provide students with the opportunity to develop their skills in translating literary texts as well as to acquaint them with the fundamentals of translation theory, strategies used by translators and make them realize basic problems such as, among others, equivalence at word level and above word level, tension between accuracy and naturalness, loss and gain in translation, the role of a cultural transfer, translating collocations, idioms and fixed expressions. Emphasis is placed not only on rendering the literary text adequately but also on considering various factors which influence the process of translation, both linguistic and non-linguistic ones. The point of departure for translation is a literary interpretation of chosen texts from British and Anglophone literature (with the exception of American literature), which enables students to establish their priorities as translators.

During the seminar students will be expected to write an MA thesis which should include a translation of a chosen literary text from English into Polish (about 30 – 40 pages) and a commentary on the process of translating.
Prof. dr hab. Wiesław Krajka

The seminar accommodates M. A. papers in the following academic areas:

1/ XIX-XX-century literature in English - prose (preferred), poetry and drama - written in all countries except USA. The seminar accommodates M. A. paper projects dealing with all possible literary phenomena within this time frame: all possible aspects, trends, writers, literary works; paper projects representing any possible way of treatment as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to studied material. The argument must be framed with references to appropriate number of secondary sources: literary historical, general, and others.

2/ Literary interpretation through translation. A student writes his/her own literary translation of a substantial portion of literary texts (a short story or poems or parts from a play or a novel) from English into Polish. His/her M. A. paper concerns various dilemmas and difficulties encountered in the course of this translation and reasons for the choices adopted in his/her translation. Such paper is framed with appropriate number of references to published works from translational theory and criticism.

The aim of the course is also to offer practical guidance for pursuing M.A. projects in literature in English. The professor discusses some typical problems and difficulties encountered by students in the course of writing their M.A. papers and some possible ways of overcoming them.


MK 5

Dr hab. Adam Głaz

Conceptualising reality. On the trail of culture in language
To see language as a part of culture is unsurprising – but can we track down culture in language? In other words, can we recognise, describe, and account for what’s cultural in the way we speak and/or write? This is essentially what we’ll be concerned with in this seminar. Crucially, we will be applying the findings of cognitive linguistics for the purpose and its focus on the various ways we construe what might appear as “objective” reality. In brief: cognitive linguistics helps us correlate the way we experience and think about the world with the way we speak, but our experiences are in large measure culturally shaped. What we want to achieve is therefore a possibly coherent account of how language, cognition, and culture are correlated.

Dr hab. Halina Chodkiewicz, prof.UMCS
MA seminar in EFL Didactics

The seminar will look at current issues concerning the enhancement of receptive skills in English as a foreign language at the secondary school level. First, the theoretical basis for the acquisition and use of foreign language listening and reading skills as well as FL learners’ problems in developing them will be focused upon. Special emphasis will be put on analyzing a variety of activities to be employed in the classroom, including their suitability for learners’ needs, functions and language learning potential. The participants of the seminar will choose to investigate topics they will personally find interesting in the area discussed. They may also suggest a topic of their own interest that concerns some other language learning and teaching issue they would like to explore in their MA thesis. The MA thesis will consist of a theoretical part as well as a research part. The action research study that students are expected to design will be based on a set of four lessons planned on the basis of clearly defined principles. The lessons will be taught by the students in natural classroom conditions as a part of their teacher training practice.

Tourism is not only one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world. As a form of consumption shaped by social and psychological forces, it also is a cultural phenomenon involving inter-cultural encounters, creating new meanings attached to people and spaces, but also generating conflicts and dilemmas. The success of tourism industry in the 21^st century largely depends on effective destination marketing with the help of specialized tourism media. Using various communication technologies, they mediate in the process of conveying tourism products from the producers to the consumers.

This seminar in the cultural study of tourism will focus on various tourism media texts in order to identify social identities constructed and projected in them to the wider world to suit the tastes and interests of prospective visitors. These identities are essentially of two types: of tourists and of host communities. A more detailed subdivision involves national, ethnic, cultural, gender/sexual and age identities. Depending on students’ individual choices and preferences, the research material for MA projects will be various types of tourism media: guidebooks, brochures, travelogues in Sunday newspaper supplements, videos and official websites promoting tourism in a city, region etc. in an English-speaking country. The ultimate goal of the course is developing research projects leading to original conclusions about selected identities encoded in the individually chosen texts.

The analytical approach to the touristic discourse will be multimodal discourse analysis, which focuses on how identities are constructed through the use of multiple modes of communication: language, visuals and sound. We shall identify in the texts the techniques of the language of tourism (eg. keying, comparison, humour), with visual techniques (eg. colour, format, visual clichés), verbal and visual techniques combined (puzzles, collage etc.) as well as sound effects (diegetic/non-diegetic sounds, human/non-human sounds etc.).