Technical Translation Assignment
For the second half of the semester, you will be engaged in a multi-stage project. The objectives of this assignment are as follows:
To give you practice and experience at clarifying and contextualizing difficult technical language for a non-specialized audience.
To give you practice at research in a complex, living, bureaucratic setting.
To give you a sense of what it feels to be confronted with language that is technical, the contents of which you need to understand, but it is not written for you. This is so that you can think more cogently about one of the primary jobs of the technical writer: translating things for non-specialists.
1) You will be given a section of the California Education Code as a base document. You primary job will be to translate and present that document so that a student at the college can read and understand it without much trouble.
Length requirement? It is more a question about if you have fully explained the law. The question to answer is “how best to make this legaleze easy and accessible to a student with little to no familiarity with the language of the law” (like most of you)?
2) Your second job will be to see beyond the document to its context. Here are some sample questions– you are not required to answer all of these and are not limited to those questions. What other portions of the education code are directly relevant to this portion? Are there important state laws the section refers to? Are there other state laws that relate? Are Federal Laws and Codes that are relevant? Is there a history behind this piece of Education law in California? Are there current events that relate to your code?
Length requirement? The answer is as much as you think is necessary to give your audience—a curious and activist student—enough information to be satisfied that they know why and how the code was created in this fashion.
3) And finally, in order to drive home the relevance of these codes, you will be required to append to your translation three examples (total) of this law in action on our campus—and explain how these examples illustrate the relevant details of the code in question. (cont’d)
For example: there is a segment of the education code that discusses Free Speech on campus. It is not very long, but if I were going to illustrate one of its provisions with an example from this campus, I would want to discuss the dude wandering around the quad this afternoon yelling at people about being damned unless they took Jesus into their lives. I would discuss what the code suggests is appropriate Free Speech, in time, place, and manner, as well as any other contextual documents, like our code of conduct, and discuss what the appropriate action is with regard to this dude.
All research material MUST be cited. MLA format is required, including in-text citations and a Works Cited page.
As always, your work will be graded on the following:
Clarity: The information is presented in a way that is easy for the audience to understand. This means you need to know your audience.
Comprehensiveness: There is enough detail in each document to put those who read it fully in the picture.
Concision: The document does not go on for unnecessary pages—it covers the ground thoroughly but not ad nauseum.
Correctness: It does not make a lot of grammar and punctuation mistakes.
Design: The design of the document should enhance its readability and give clues as to the style of the writer.
For the use a real example part the school is Antelope Valley College and make sure we can find where you get the information in a separate document.
The codes that will be translated will be below in the attached files as well as the way we are supposed to site our source which will also be listed.
use this website for all citings except for the real example from our campus https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/home.xhtml
Make sure all citing are peer-reviewed if not from the website given above
The most important part of this assignment is translating these education codes into simple language to a person who just entered high school should understand.
