Postgraduate Diploma in Translation

This module will focus on the core aspects of Irish language grammar. The aim is to help participants improve their ability in Irish by giving them a range of grammar exercises to do in which the focus will be on common points of difficulty with the language. There will be a particular emphasis on useful idiomatic expressions and on the importance of avoiding direct translation from English to Irish. Punctuation and editing will also be addressed, and students will be given information about the technological resources available to those who write in Irish.

This module aims to help students develop and improve their translation skills. They will be taught to deal critically and analytically with the problems that often arise in English–Irish translation, e.g. jargon, register, semantic gaps and syntactic differences between the two languages. There will be an emphasis on Anglicism and how to avoid it, and the module will also look at the challenges of translating new terminology and the difficulty of translating concepts from English to Irish. There will be a particular focus on intelligibility and the importance of taking the target audience into consideration when a text is being translated. The module will deal primarily with the types of texts most frequently translated to Irish in a professional context – annual reports and television scripts, for example – but students will also have an opportunity to translate a range of other texts, including literary texts.

In the first part of this module, the main aspects of contemporary translation theory will be explored and the various types of translation that suit different genres of texts will be discussed. There will also be a focus on translation criticism in order to give students a better understanding of what constitutes a ‘good translation’ or ‘bad translation’. The second part of the module will look at translation as a career and students will be given practical information about working in that sector, e.g. employment opportunities in Irish and EU institutions, the work typically done in translation companies. This module will build on the Translation Theory / A Career in Translation module and students will have a further opportunity to study translation criticism and theories of translation. They will be required to critically analyse various types of translated texts in light of those theories to assess their merit as translations and target language texts. Students will use the material from the two modules to undertake a research project: a critical essay on a text translated from English to Irish.

This module will look at legal translation in Ireland and in the EU institutions. The difficulty of translating texts of this type will be explored and there will also be a focus on register and style, constitutional questions, precedents, and decisions regarding terminology and intelligibility.

This optional module seeks to make students aware of the most important technological resources available to those who work through Irish and in the translation sector. The module will aim to enable students to find information regarding Irish language grammar and terminology online so that they can write at a much higher level in the language. Students will be taught how to make effective use of terminology databases and there will also be a focus on Phrase, a cloud-based commercial translation management system and computer-assisted translation tool. (We would like to thank Phrase for granting us free access to their platform through the Phrase Academic Plan.) Students will attend two one-day workshops online, which will take place in May and June 2024 (dates to be decided).