Staff & Student Area

This capstone project serves as a culminating academic experience for students and enables them to put into practice what they have learned in the various theoretical and practical translation and interpreting courses of the MA programme. Students can choose to undertake either a Translation or an Interpreting project to fulfil this capstone requirement.

For the Translation project, students can choose to work on (1) a long translation or (2) a paper on a topic of translation studies.

Students working on the long translation needs to render a text from a book (Chinese or English) approved by the Programme Coordinator and project supervisors as early as the beginning of the third semester (for part-time students) or the beginning of the second semester (for full-time students). All students work under the supervision of a teacher assigned by the Programme Coordinator. Students can choose to translate a text from Chinese to English or vice versa, and the length of the source text should be about 7,000 characters for Chinese or 4,500 words for English. Students are required to submit their translations by three instalments and to meet with their supervisors individually for follow-up discussions. The final version of their work should be submitted with an introduction of 3,200-4,000 characters in Chinese or 2,000-2,500 words in English written in the target language of their project. In the introduction, students are expected to describe and explain the distinctive features of the source text, their translation goals, strategies and target readers, and to critically evaluate their own work by citing examples from it and relevant theories as appropriate.

Students choosing the translation studies paper will need to formulate a research topic on translation and write up a paper under the guidance of a supervisor. The paper can be written in English or Chinese (5,000 words in English; 8,000 characters in Chinese). The research may involve a linguistic or socio-cultural approach to topics of translation. As for the nature of the studies, it can be a philosophical discussion of issues of translation, a corpus-based analysis, or an empirical study of a translation phenomenon etc. Students are required to draw on the literature of their field of study and cite translation theories in their analysis where appropriate.

Students undertaking an Interpreting project are required to produce a paper in either English or Chinese (5,000 words in English; 8,000 characters in Chinese). The paper is based on their analysis of a video or audio recording of an interpreted meeting. The interpretation should be conducted from English to Chinese or vice versa, and the length of the meeting should be about 20 minutes. The recording, both the original and the interpretation, has to be transcribed, if no transcripts are available. The transcript is excluded from the word count. Students can focus their analysis on omissions or additions in interpretation, semantic or pragmatic equivalence, as well as the overall quality of the interpretation. Students are expected to cite Translation or Interpreting theories in their analysis where appropriate. In the process of writing, students are required to meet with their supervisors individually on a regular basis to discuss their work and progress.

Assessment: 100% coursework