A Collaborative, Didactic and Profession-Oriented Project Based on the Translation of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

This essay addresses an innovative and collaborative didactic experience in the field of literary translation. The project took place within Advanced Literary Translation, an optional subject in the last year of the Degree in Translation and Interpreting of the University of Alicante. The main literary aim was to provide a multiple and comprehensive approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets from which the readers could attain a detailed view of the poems from various and complementary angles. To this end, we performed a double translation, in prose and verse, completed by a rhetorical analysis and a synopsis of each sonnet. All this was done in order to contribute some added value to already existing translations, none of which provides this combination. The main didactic aim was to place the students in a real professional situation, with a specific commission, in order to empower them (Kiraly, 2001, 2005, 2014). Under the supervision of and with feedback from the teacher, the methodology was based on horizontal group work with the idea that this would enhance collaboration and quality control through peer revision (Pietrzak, 2014). To this, a distribution of specific roles for each translation was added, with students alternatively acting as publisher, translator, documentalist and proof editor in each group. The publication of the results in a real book by a professional publisher was the final result sought. Apart from the dialectic process of horizontal and vertical feedbacks, an anonymous questionnaire was administered to elicit the students' degree of satisfaction and alternative didactic strategies. The project was further sanctioned by an external expert agent, the publisher, for whom the actual launching of the book involved putting his economic resources and prestige at stake.