British and American Cultures and Civilisations

Translation is never just swapping words—it's moving meaning between cultures, and this course gives you the British and American context you'll keep bumping into for the rest of the TRIN curriculum. You'll work through US history from colonization through the Cold War alongside the British strand (Saxons, Shakespeare, Ireland, humor), reading sources like Oakland and The American Yawp and presenting your own analysis comparing source-culture and target-culture framings. Think of it as the cultural backbone behind the translation and interpreting workshops in later semesters: without knowing why Jim Crow or the Norman Conquest matters, you'll mistranslate the references that actually carry the weight of a text.