This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.

What is translation? What is a language? So essential and widespread is translation today that it has become a central analytic term for the contact of cultures, and a paradigm for studying many different aspects of our multilingual world. This course will consider translation as it appeared in the past, but especially as it constructs everyday life in the contemporary world. It will look at issues of anthropology, artificial intelligence, diplomacy, film, law and literature that involve interlingual and intercultural communication.

This course will explore the seldom-discussed connections between migration, language, and translation. While studying the movement of peoples, often in collaboration with the university- wide Sawyer Seminar, Global Migration: A Dialogue between the Humanities and Social Sciences, we will focus particular attention on the ways language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in different cultures and of those who interact with them directly and indirectly.

A required course for students taking the certificate in Translation and Intercultural Communication but open to all who are interested in translation or any of its aspects, that is in movements between languages of any sort. Readings will focus on recent contributions to the emerging disciplines of translation studies across a wide spectrum of thematic fields (science, law, anthropology, literature, etc.). The seminar will incorporate the individual experiences of the students in their contact with different disciplines and idioms and, where relevant, in developing their senior theses.