You may have used a translator before while on a trip or watched a show in a foreign language with translated subtitles. You’ve likely read books that were translated (actually, you certainly have: the Bible, The Odyssey, etc.), and listened to music where the singer sings in two languages, translating themselves for listeners of multiple cultures and communities. In today’s global society, translation is all around us, and yet it’s rare that we pause to reflect on how the act of translation happened.
If you’re passionate about words, language, communication, and connecting with different people and cultures, translation may be the right path for you. Translators learn to maintain the beauty of a phrase through its translation, whether the phrase is spoken, sung, or written. It requires linguistic mastery as well as narrative mastery, and translators are highly sought after in publishing, art, history, academia, and journalism.
Below we’ve listed our 10 favorite undergraduate programs in translation that meld language study and literary arts.
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Harvard University — Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harvard is a leader in the field of translation, and offers Translation Studies as a secondary field in the Department of Comparative Literature. “More than simply examining how meaning is transferred,” Harvard students open “up a space to examine linguistic encounter and exchange across languages.”
Smith College — Northampton, Massachusetts
The Translation Studies concentration at Smith accepts sophomores, and only 15 students per year. Students admitted into the program are required to study abroad, as well as to complete an internship or independent research project. “At a time of intensive globalization,” they write, “translation is an indispensable discipline.”
Yale University— New Haven, Connecticut
Yale offers an undergraduate certificate in Translation Studies in the Translation Initiative of the Macmillan Center, through which they put particular focus on health care and legal translation. Students have access to intensive courses, summer internships, The Translation Forum lectures, and the Journal of Literary Translation, and the leaders of the program are also interested in the power of machine translation — or AI.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The translation program at UNC, a minor in Translation and Interpreting, provides students with “theory, technical resources, research skills, and literary and cultural competency that are necessary to communicate in more than one language.” To study the minor, students must be majoring in Hispanic Literature and Cultures or in Hispanic Linguistics, and cannot have declared another minor.
University of Connecticut — Mansfield, Connecticut
The Literary Translation minor at UConn is open to students studying any language at the university and requires translation courses, literature or culture courses focused on the target language, and an English creative writing course to hone your narrative skills.
Stanford University — Stanford, California
Students in the Translation Studies minor at Stanford are enrolled in a multidisciplinary program in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, in partnership with East Asian Languages and Cultures and the English Department. Students can come from nearly any major.
University of Arizona — Tucson, Arizona
The Translation and Interpretation Program in the College of Humanities Department of Spanish & Portuguese combines a bachelor’s degree in Spanish with a concentration in translation and interpretation, with a focus on healthcare and legal fields in particular. Students also come into the program from pre-nursing, pre-med, public health, speech therapy, psychology, law, and business.
Boston University — Boston, Massachusetts
Undergraduates in the program in Literary Translation at Boston University can compete for the Fitzgerald, Traum, and Chinese translation prizes while completing the program. To gain the skills necessary to win those prizes, students have access to courses in German, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and more, and then also broader courses like “Literary Style Workshop” and work-focused courses like “Reading Course in Lucretius.”
University of Iowa — Iowa City, Iowa
The BA in Translation at the University of Iowa prepares students to work in translation in “literary, legal, medical, or technical” fields, and “students who major in translation become learned users of translation and critically reflective participants in the global circulation of information.”
Hunter College — New York, New York
A major in Translation and Interpretation Studies from Hunter College prepares students for translation and interpretation from English to Spanish, and Spanish to English. Students take at least one course in contemporary English literature alongside the study of Spanish literature.
If you’re passionate about language and want to build bridges between cultures, translation may be right for you.
If you know where you want to go in life but aren’t sure how to get there, send us an email. We help students like you find, and get into, their perfect college.