As the lights rose on the English-language debut of the primetime drama “Nobunaga Concerto,” students from UW-Milwaukee stood to explain how they had translated it from its original Japanese.
Associate Professor Aragorn Quinn sat quietly in the back of the room in the UWM Student Union. While the Translating Japanese Media course is his brainchild, bringing Japanese film to English-speaking audiences wasn’t his main goal.
“Students come for a translation class and to build Japanese skills,” Quinn said. “But as important as those skills are, the class is meant to teach students how to form and contribute to high performing groups.”
Teaching Silicon Valley lessons through film
Before coming to UWM, Quinn spent a summer working with Silicon Valley consultants as part of a leadership lab at Stanford University.
“It was mostly targeted to business school students, and I was definitely not a business school student, but that made it even more exciting for me,” Quinn said. “I got to be a research assistant with these cool consultants who work with Apple and IDEO. It gave me an in into how (these companies) work. They created an amazing curriculum.”
Quinn brought a copy of that curriculum with him to UWM.
The university had a traditional translation class on the books, but fresh from his Silicon Valley experience, Quinn wanted to rethink the class to focus on a larger group project that brought new media — specifically, a TV show or film — into English for the first time.
Group work is a specific skill — and one that is often assumed in college, Quinn said. When students are focused on the end product and the grade is based on the outcome rather than the process, ambitious students in low-performing groups can take over. For example, one might pull an all-nighter and just do the project themselves. But that student has missed a valuable opportunity, because that’s not how projects work in companies and organizations — and it’s not how high-performing groups function.
“It’s cool that (my students) get to use their language skills in a way that’s meaningful and important,” Quinn said. “But learning how to work well in a high-performing group is what I think is really awesome about this class.”
Mastering teamwork through translation challenges
Japanese can be difficult for English speakers to learn because it uses a different grammar structure and a complex system of characters in its writing.
“My classes are hard, and I don’t pull punches with my students,” Quinn said. “But they’re down for it — they want to speak Japanese better. They want to know more about Japanese culture. They’re up for the challenge.”
For Translating Japanese Media, Quinn selects two Japanese films that haven’t been released with English subtitles and that have a thematic tie. One year, for example, both films starred critically acclaimed actress Sakura Ando and focused on family struggles.
To make things extra challenging, Quinn doesn’t give his students the Japanese script, forcing them to rely on their listening skills and work together.
“It’s a very deliberate choice,” he said. “What are you going to do with this challenge that’s not a thing you can plug into Google Translate?”
Although he has at least one former student who now works professionally translating and subtitling Japanese media, Quinn’s priority is using language-learning to grow career skills that are applicable wherever students’ paths take them.
“No matter what they do for the rest of their lives, whether they use Japanese professionally or follow another path, their ability to create and be a part of a high-performing group will be a thing that is valuable to them,” he said.
