Assignment: Discourse Community Translation

This is an assignment based on June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”, a translingual piece about Black English in academic settings. In that article, she writes about teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in a class called “In Search of the Invisible Black Woman.” Although the course is full of black students who speak in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Black English, as Jordan and her students prefer, they found Walker’s use of vernacular English confusing. Jordan realizes that the students had never seen their spoken language written. As a class, they translate a passage from The Color Purple into Standard Edited American English and realize how the translation affects the meaning of the passage.

After reading Jordan’s article, I ask students to take a passage from a piece of literature not written in their own discourse and to translate it into a discourse they use regularly. Students often draw on texts from their other courses and produce inventive, fun, and funny translations. We spend the majority of the next class period reading through the different translations and discussing the process of translation. Students also have an opportunity to discuss one of the discourse communities that they are a part of. Finally, we discuss what it means to move between different discourses and how the act of translation shifts meaning. This can also help students (and instructors!) understand the difficulty in moving among languages.

In order to complete this exercise, students need a strong understanding of discourse communities.