Modern Languages with Translation BA

This module offers the opportunity to apply the detailed knowledge of different areas of translation theory that you acquired during years one and two. Working independently under expert supervision, you will produce an extended translation into English of an approved text of your choice together with a commentary in English outlining your overall translation strategy and discussing translation difficulties and solutions. Completing this module will help you to demonstrate relevant experience when applying for jobs in the translation sector. 

We’ll introduce you to a variety of different techniques and help you start building the key skills required to ​begin your exciting journey of becoming a successful interpreter. You’ll explore simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, putting your findings into practice with your classmates. We’ll also explore some of the obstacles interpreters face and teach you how to navigate around them.

Through lectures, skills-based classes and time spent practising your newly-acquired skills (using the online platform for interpreters and/or in the interpreter’s booth) you ​should see an improvement to your listening, concentration and memory skills.

By the end of the module you’ll have gained a solid ​introductory understanding of interpreting skills and will feel confident and capable when putting them into practice in the easy level interpreting tasks. ​This module could become a first step towards your further training to become a professional interpreter!

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency, training you in a more formal, sophisticated register of spoken and written Spanish.

We'll continue to use a wide range of authentic Spanish texts to further deepen your knowledge and confidence at this advanced level. We'll look at how the texts are put together so that you may use these skills within your written and spoken Spanish, taking you to the highest level of proficiency.

Following your time spent living in a French-speaking country this advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll help you continue to improve your oral and written skills using a wide variety of texts.

Your grammar expertise and vocabulary shall be deepened through the production of linguistic commentary and summaries. In addition, we'll help you develop translation skills. Your French writing skills will improve immeasurably as we translate into and out of French creative writing in different registers.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll continue to improve your four key language skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking through class discussions and the use of relevant texts such as complex newspaper articles, detailed radio and TV programmes and increasingly sophisticated fiction.

You'll also study translation and work towards professional standards giving you a solid grounding for a career or further studies in translation.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll continue to improve your five key language skills of reading/comprehension, listening, writing, speaking, and cultural awareness through translation and writing workshops, class discussions and the use of relevant texts such as authentic newspaper articles, radio and TV programmes and sophisticated fiction.

We'll give you the opportunity to develop translation skills (with emphasis on Russian-English) and gain creative writing experience, demonstrating your advanced Russian capabilities and helping you build a potential portfolio to assist you in either finding employment or postgraduate study.

This year-long module builds on the skills acquired in Serbian/Croatian 1 with more emphasis on independent learning and preparation.

The module develops abilities to break down complex linguistic structures in order to facilitate comprehension and communication skills.

Teaching uses materials from written, audio and video sources, and includes grammar classes. There are exercises in comprehension, translation, guided composition writing, and presentations in the target language.

You develop expertise in summarising texts in the target language, comprehension of both written and spoken material, translation, guided composition writing and oral presentations in the target language.

The module includes study of the different cultural, social and historical factors which influence language use.

Now that you have gained solid Mandarin language skills, we'll push you to develop them to a more sophisticated level. Not only will you continue to improve your understanding of the language but also the cultures of the Mandarin-speaking world.

With your increased proficiency you'll be able to examine more complex texts covering themes such as leisure activities and lifestyles, personalities, love and relationships, economic developments, language learning, and social customs.

You will be asked to reflect and compare your own culture and the target culture via group discussions and debates to enhance both, your cultural awareness and intercultural competence.

This module includes: 

• topics such as careers, job application, contemporary Chinese families and marriages, gift cultures corruption and life for Chinese people today 
• vocabulary on the above 
• grammar knowledge for the level 
• language functions such as expression ideal situations, reasoning for choices and opinions 
• understanding of authentic materials on the above topics 
• productive skills for the above topics

This module will focus mainly on:

• reading skills for understanding research-relevant texts
• writing skills for presenting academic ideas and debating in such contexts
• understanding spoken Mandarin Chinese for academic contexts and about social and cultural issues
• communication in spoken Mandarin Chinese for such contexts

This year-long module is based on guided independent study of a chosen topic in the field of French and Francophone Studies for which supervision can be offered by the Department. Topics typically relate to a module taken in the second year, or to a module to be taken in the final year, and it is expected that students have some familiarity with the chosen field.

Dissertation topics in past years have included:

• The feminist and humanist aspects of Christine de Pizan's work.
• How Albert Memmi's philosophy of colonised identity is prefigured in his literary work.
• The representation of women in three novels by Dany Laferrière.
• The representation of women in the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
• The definition of malaise in the context of contemporary socio-economic and political issues in France.
• Presidential Power in the Fifth Republic.
• The urban landscape in surrealism.
• Translating humour from English to French.

Teaching takes place in the form of regular individual meetings with the allocated supervisor, and group meetings with the module convenor, centred more generally on research and writing skills.

Semester 1 is devoted to research, reading and planning, leading to the submission of a dissertation abstract, chapter outline and preliminary bibliography, as well as the presentation of posters. In the second semester, students write up and complete the dissertation under the continued guidance of the supervisor.

This module explores how the Fifth Republic came into being and examines the problems of bedding in a regime that revolutionised French political culture without jettisoning the key features of the 'modèle républicain'.

We follow a chronological narrative of French politics between 1958 and 1969, and will also examine themes such as the ‘écriture de la constitution’, the clash of political visions and bipolarisation and its tensions. We conclude with de Gaulle's apparent act of 'political suicide' in 1969.

In this module students learn to devise and develop projects and teaching methods appropriate to engage the age and ability group they are working with. The module enables students to gain confidence in communicating their subject, develop strong organisational and interpersonal skills, and to understand how to address the needs of individuals.

This module looks at the various ways in which the novel has evolved and adapted to “the contemporary” by responding to the “everyday”. Giving an overview of the various approaches to the everyday in the contemporary novel from the 60s to the present, this module will explore how key authors negotiate, through their writing, the everyday’s indeterminacy and the unstable space it occupies between the social and the individual.

This module is designed to introduce you to the study of various forms of artistic work in relation to the political and social background of the French Revolutionary decade (1789 - 1799). A variety of works will be studied (theatre, opera, song, iconography, painting) in order to consider the reflection of contemporary events, the notion of politically engaged arts, and questions of cultural administration (theatrical repertory, representation, censorship and privilege).

The module will examine the range of social, political and philosophical questions raised by mass immigration to France in the post-war period. These questions will be tackled through historical analysis of patterns of migration and changing immigration policies, as well as through the study of relevant films, novels and theoretical texts which engage with questions of citizenship, identity and ethnicity.

This module aims to introduce you to key aspects of French documentary cinema by considering a range of documentary cinematic techniques, and by looking at the ways in which documentary form has developed over time. The module examines the work of a range of filmmakers and explores the theoretical, socio-cultural and ethical questions raised by documentary cinema.

You will develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the different ways in which documentaries attempt to engage audiences and deal in sophisticated and often challenging ways with a range of issues.

This module encourages students to evaluate the attitudes that are displayed towards different types of language variation in French both inside and outside France. It focuses in particular on attitudes towards varieties of French which differ from the Standard French used in Paris.

The module first introduces students to the concept of Standard Language ideology. It then introduces them to a variety of sources which display varying attitudes to French from the 17th century to the present day, including texts on ‘good usage’ in French, language advice columns, online blogs, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sources are examined to determine what areas of the French language are viewed positively and what areas are critiqued, and the methods used to critique language.

The module also explores attitudes towards instances of proposed language change, including proposals to reform the French spelling system and to make language more gender inclusive, and attitudes towards regional varieties of French which different from Standard French, such as the French spoken in North America and Africa.

In addition, students are introduced to the various methods used to analyse and measure language attitudes and encouraged to consider the advantages and disadvantages of methods including corpus studies, questionnaire studies, interview studies and discourse analysis studies. 

This module focuses on the theory and practice of two modes of audio-visual translation: subtitling and dubbing.

The linguistic, technical, and cultural theoretical underpinnings of subtitling and dubbing from French into English will be examined in detail, and students will be able to put the theory into practice using professional dedicated software.

This module provides final-year students studying French as part of their degree with the opportunity to study in some depth eight contemporary French-language films that deal in different ways with the interaction between personal and political aspects of contemporary life.

The module will encourage students to engage with the films both thematically as texts that articulate important contemporary issues, and also formally as films that draw on specific cinematic techniques and make a series of aesthetic choices in order to engage with the personal and the political.

This module invites students to critically engage with representations of apparently disruptive and transgressive French and Francophone women from determining moments in French history between 1789 and 1945, including individuals who were violent, who took up arms, were transgressive, broke laws, and were institutionalized, deported, and defamed in the press, all in the name of social justice.

Examples include revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, who dressed as a man in order to fight for women's revolutionary involvement and was institutionalised for madness, and Louise Michel, one of the women accused of setting devastating fires that gutted government and cultural institutions during the Semaine Sanglante of the Paris Commune. 

Students will analyse case studies in the light of the dominant gender discourses of their time (during the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Belle Epoque, and the First and Second World Wars), as manifest in cultural representation, such as press, literary and visual sources.

Where possible, they will also study the voice of lived experience, via memoirs and works published by the women in question, in order to explore how their own perspectives interacted with representations of them.

Literature uses ancient mythology as a rich source to describe powerful emotions, cunning politics or psychological drama. This module will explore how selected German writers engage with the myth of Medea, the powerful wife of Jason, who - according to the Classical myth - kills the sons she loves to hurt Jason.

We will look at how the myth is used, changed and reinvented in texts written between 1926 and 1998. We will consider theoretical writings on mythology and also look at the the Medea myth in paintings, film, theatre and music.

This module involves in-depth study of a topic in German Studies, and will normally relate to a second year German module. Teaching will consist of regular individual consultations with a designated tutor. Possible topics could include linguistics (for example, the use of Anglicisms in German), German cinema, German history, theatre, literature, gender studies, Heimat.

The dissertation may be 10 or 20 credits, depending on what is most appropriate for your individual programme of study. A 10-credit dissertation is 4,000 words in length, and a 20-credit dissertation is 7,000 words. Dissertations may be written in English or in German.

In this module we will investigate how German (and other languages) are used in social media, especially by young German speakers.

It is sometimes said that people don’t write “properly” online. Is that true? You will be introduced to frameworks for analysing language use in digital contexts, and we will explore an online corpus (i.e. a very large collection) of German social media, in order to investigate themes such as:

• the use of emoji
• non-standard grammar
• linguistic creativity
• borrowings from other languages
• multilingualism

You will learn to apply basic quantitative analysis to make sense of your data. We will also consider the role of Artificial Intelligence in influencing how people interact through digital social media.

This module investigates resistance and opposition in the GDR. It looks at developments during particular time periods:

• 1945-49
• 1953-68
• 1970-80
• 1980-89

The three main areas of investigation are:

• political resistance and alternative ideas within the SED-party ranks and the institution of the Church in the early years
• the role of intellectual dissidents and their ideas surrounding reform of GDR socialism
• the formation of organised oppositional groups and their intellectual basis in the 1980s

This module will introduce you to different forms, modes, and models of interpreting as well as the issues that are often encountered by professional interpreters.  It offers opportunities to explore the different techniques/skills required for both simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. The main difficulties of interpreting will be examined, along with strategies to deal with them. The module is seminar-led in order to maximise practice in class.

This module covers popular music in Russia during the late tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras as an area of culture that affects ordinary people in many different ways – in Russia, songs have often brought people together, sometimes in celebration, sometimes to challenge authority, and they have also offered individuals fun or solace.

In the module you learn how to examine all this, applying concepts such as authorship, performance, technology and ideology, and learning how to evaluate the relationship Russian music has to popular music in the UK, USA and elsewhere. The examples studied include pre-revolutionary popular songs and gramophone culture, the assimilation of jazz, patriotic and propaganda songs, rock and pop-rock.

With guidance you will develop your own essay question focusing on a topic within Russian popular musical culture of their choice. No prior study of music is required for this module but you must also be taking Russian 3, or to be at an equivalent level in Russian, in order to choose this module.

You'll gain an understanding of the growth and development of the cult of saints in the Eastern Christian world in the context of the history and culture of late antiquity and the middle ages.

We focus on the interpretation of original written sources and icons, allowing you to master the basic tools for conducting research in the field.

This module introduces the construction of national and collective memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Russian culture and society. The lectures and seminars focus on contemporary and subsequent artistic and social responses to the experience of war, but also examine individual acts of remembering (diaries, reports, letters) in the context of a wider cultural memory.

The module equips you with the skills to analyse, evaluate and discuss Russian and Soviet commemorations of the Second World War and the construction of a collective memory; to identify and contrast different strands of narratives of war experiences which unite individual and collective responses to the Second World War; to analyse and apply relevant theories of memory to Russian and Soviet strategies of commemorating the war; to discuss some of the central problems related to Russian and Soviet memories of the Second World War, including the relationship between memory and forgetting, narratives of suffering and sacrifice and the relationship between acts and rituals of commemoration and the construction of national identity/identities.

This module aims to equip you with the skills required of linguists in the modern, digital workplace and may be taken by those studying Russian or Serbian/Croatian.

The project gives you the opportunity to combine your achievements in language and non-language modules studied over the course of their degree. You work in a group on a topic agreed with the module convenor to create a final Language Project, in the form of a translation, blogpost, podcast, short film or public performance.

Working closely with a supervisor who teaches and researches in a relevant field, final year students carry out in-depth research into a topic of their choice, building on work they have done in a module studied in year two or the final year.

Areas of study include history, literature, cinema, music and religion.

Recent topics include:

• Mongol rule in medieval Russia
• the cultural remembrance of Porajmos (the genocide over Roma during World War II)
• the works of Mikhail Bulgakov
• reporting on the Pussy Riot trial in UK and Russian media
• adaptations of US television comedy series for the Russian market

This module looks at key 20th century Spanish American novels and short stories and considers issues such as race, gender, sexuality and the conflict of cultures. You will be trained in using a broad range of tools of narrative and rhetorical analysis so as to engage in debates about literary representation and aesthetics, and will hone your use of these through a programme of research tasks, seminar presentations, group discussions, and written assignments.

This module aims to provide you with the training necessary to be able to engage independently, under the guidance of a supervisor, in self-directed research on a topic that the student selects on the basis of an aspect of your Year Abroad experience.

Through a series of one-on-one tutorials, and the submission of a proposal, a literary review, and chapter draft, the student is advised on how to sustain an argument over up to 7,000 words, and how to underpin this argument with appropriate and innovative research.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the centrality of the history of slavery in the study of Brazilian society and of the significance of Brazilian Slavery in both the transatlantic slave systems and slave societies in the Americas. In the first semester the module introduces students to the different disciplinary and intellectual approaches to the study of slavery in Brazil.

Through a combination of lecture and seminar work, students are encouraged to develop skills of analysis and interpretation through close reading of key texts. While the historiographical focus in on Brazil, the module attempts to accommodate students who have not studied Brazilian history or Portuguese. Mindful of the different skills sets and degree programmes of all students, the module draws on comparative contexts of slavery across the Americas both thematically and theoretically.

Topics covered in the first part of the module include the ideology of slavery, economics of slavery, systems of slave labour, slave culture and community, slave identity, and slave resistance. Within these topics we examine themes of agency, race, class, ethnicity and gender.

Over the course of the first semester students are expected to identify a topic for their second-semester research essay. The second semester is student lead, based on presentation work in a seminar setting. Students will be required to produce individual in-class presentations (work-in-progress) based on their book review.

Throughout the module close attention will be paid to the problems of sources and perspectives in the study of the history of slavery. The module encourages students to develop an awareness of how different historical sources are used and to think critically about them. In class discussions and in written work the expectation is that students apply comparative analysis and demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of historiography. 

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll build on your grammatical competence and assist you to develop a more sophisticated and formal register of vocabulary, idiom and advanced syntax.

During class you'll gain the ability to discuss a wide range of topics in written and spoken Portuguese, giving you the confidence to converse articulately upon complex and intellectual subjects.

You may believe that politics and literature are two distinct fields of study, but this module will help you understand the complex but integral relationship between the two.

We’ll explore the representation of key social and political issues within contemporary Spanish literature. You’ll discover how literature in late capitalism, and contemporary ‘Hispanic’ authors in particular, dealt with issues of language, identity, culture, society, nationhood, gender, class, memory, time and writing.

We also explore debates regarding the consistency of the categories of ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanishness’ when analysing cultural production in contemporary Iberia. This shall lead us to assess the competing discursive practices involved in remapping the notion of Spanish canonical literature at the beginning of the new millennium.

Taught in Spanish, this module has been designed to give you a thorough insight into Spanish business including the contexts that have influenced its development and the ways it interacts with wider society.

We'll investigate a range of factors that have shaped the Spanish business landscape since the transition to democracy, such as:

• changes within the global and European regulatory environment
• ideological factors
• entrepreneurship
• government action to attract foreign investors, promote Spanish FDI and boost trade with regions such as Latin America, Europe and China.

You'll not only gain a historical understanding, but a contemporary perspective too by looking at case studies of both companies like Inditex (the owners of Zara and other important fashion brands) and important Spanish industries such as tourism. The module also explores some of the less positive impacts and criticisms of Spanish business practices relating to the environment, debt and corruption.

Free education from cradle to grave has been central to modern Cuba’s cultural and ideological identity. This module will encourage you to explore Cuba’s revolutionary change since 1959, through an examination of its evolving ideologies. You’ll review the critical factors of nationalism, dependency, radicalism and leadership which shaped developments from the original rebellion up to the present day.

Together we’ll discover the role of education policies and the ways in which a ‘cultural revolution’ was fundamental to the socialisation process of, and popular participation in (or dissent from) the Revolution.

This study will help you form conclusions about both the meaning of ‘ideology’ within the context of the Revolution, and the international geo-political significance of Cuba's self-definition and evolution.

This module will present a survey of the literature and film produced in Spain during the Franco period (1939-1975), focusing in detail on at least one literary work and one film from each decade of the Dictatorship. The chosen literary texts will include poetry and prose fiction, while the filmic ones belong to a variety of genres, including historical drama, neorealism and melodrama, comedy, and documentary.

The texts covered include some which reflect (and even help to propagate) the ideology of the rÉgime and others which stand in opposition to it. Each will, in its own way, provide an insight into the political, social and cultural attitudes of the decade to which it belongs as well as into the changing role and conditions of literary and cinematic production during this period. 

In this module students learn to devise and develop projects and teaching methods appropriate to engage the age and ability group they are working with. The module enables students to gain confidence in communicating their subject, develop strong organisational and interpersonal skills, and to understand how to address the needs of individuals.

This module discusses the competing memories and contested legacies of social and political violence in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America by focusing on the disputes over the narratives and discourses about the past (competing narratives, or “memory wars”) and how what is “remembered” and/or “forgotten” can have an impact on the ability to imagine a collective, positive future. It aims to reflect on the apparent difficulty, and obvious imperative, of imagining alternative futures in neoliberal times and thereafter.

In recognition that memory is a creative, active process of working through the past that happens in the present, it will address cultural production from the 21st century. It addresses the role of art and culture  (mainly cinema [documentary, short and feature films], short stories, visual representations) in remembering and contesting the memory of the socio-political violence and conflicts (including Military Dictatorships, civil conflicts, social protests, political persecutions, failed coups) that have shaped late 20th and 21st centuries so far and that can both limit and inspire society’s ability to project an alternative future.

The module adopts a comparative approach which focuses on the formal experiments and common preoccupations of artists, social and political actors across different national cultures and historical contexts (translations and subtitles will be provided when required). It will discuss acts of subversion and protest, violence and resistance,  authoritarianism and transitions to democracy, neocolonial and decolonial practices, racial and class inequality and social injustice, neoliberalism and post-capitalism.   

The module exposes students to an array of contemporary literary texts written in Spanish, and presents these texts and their translations against a backdrop of key research questions that explore literary translation, power and gender. The module focuses on both literary translation as a process (principles of literary translation, interventionist strategies, translators and activism), and as a product (paratexts, critical reception).

Students develop their knowledge of theory and practice throughout a series of lectures and practical translation workshops, where they will have the opportunity to apply, explore and critique the theoretical frameworks in their own translations of contemporary Hispanic literary texts.