Cultural summer with St Petersburg University: online courses for teachers, linguists and translators

St Petersburg University is consistently working on improving the quality of online education. This includes not only the content and structure of the presentation of learning materials, but also the format of their implementation. Thus, by popular request from students, almost all courses hosted on Coursera and Open Education platforms have been extended, both in terms of enrolment and in terms of final exams. This will make it possible for everyone who has not managed to enrol in time, for one reason or another, to not only join the course but also qualify for a certificate. It is known that the certificate will be useful for employment as well as for admission to master’s and doctoral programmes.

During the summer, students are offered to study eight different courses. They will be launched in turn, every Wednesday, with all course modules being available immediately upon opening. This will make it possible for students to study according to their individual plan. They will be able to study the material and do testing tasks at any convenient time. It should be remembered that a similar format of ‘free access’ for some online courses was first offered and implemented by St Petersburg University last summer.

Even now you can enrol in the first summer online course ‘Introduction to Translation Theory’.

The course is designed to develop theoretical foundations of translation activities. It will be of interest to fledgling specialists who are studying the subject by themselves as well to linguistic students as a supplementary course. A prerequisite for studying the course is proficiency in English.

There are seven modules in the course, each of which is devoted to one of the branches of translation studies. The process of studying is based on the top-down approach. For example, the first two modules offer insight into general translation history, and the third one introduces the peculiarities of translation studies in different countries. The fourth and fifth modules talk about the main issues in general translation theory. The sixth and seventh modules, the final parts of the course, focus on different genres and provide specific examples from translation practice.

Course materials are presented through short video lectures. Visual presentations and excerpts from documentaries are used. All the studies mentioned in the course can be found in the list of recommended literature, where there are also books that will be useful to students for further study of translation studies.

Follow the news on the website of the online courses of St Petersburg University so you do not miss the most interesting options.