- An English tourist on holiday in Germany had caught a cold and had lost his voice, so he went to see a doctor. "No problem", said the German doctor with a sinister grin, "ve hef vays of making people tok". (Eckert and Barry, the Phonetics and Phonology of English Pronunciation)
After having finished this course, you will laugh at this joke too! In this course you will learn the tools of correct transcription and discover how you can sound more English when you speak English, by becoming aware of melody and intonation patterns, the correct pronunciation of "troublesome" words, typical learners' pronunciation mistakes, and everything that needs to be modified in terms of articulatory phonetics. (We will deal with the pronunciation of Southern British English, also known as RP) - Efforts will concentrate on developing effective strategies for dealing with the numerous syntactic and lexical problems that one frequently encounters when translating from German into English. The goal is to provide students with the fundamental skills required in order to enable them to systematically translate texts into the target language, not as mere equivalents, but rather faithful conveyances of the original text, which accurately capture not only the message but also mood and style. Each lesson will focus on key aspects of translation which are relevant for both translation exams and real-life translation tasks.
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- "Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it." -David Sedaris
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?" - George Orwell
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." - Stephen King - This course encourages students to learn and practise the methodology and mechanics of writing a research paper at an advanced level (e.g. masters dissertation), with an emphasis on linguistic topics. Writing proficiency will be built with classroom and homework activities that include hands-on, creative and free writing exercises. These are designed to increase students’ confidence in their writing abilities. We aim to help consolidate general writing skills such as punctuation, vocabulary, syntax and style. We will explore a research topic by relying on the participants’ existing research experience. Finally, we will study and implement the specific writing conventions for linguistics papers practised at the FSU Jena.
