Waseda University

This course explores translation theories and their practical applications. Each session focuses on a specific theory or approach to translation, followed by an analysis of a translated text. The course aims to understand the crucial role of translation as a cultural and social practice and to become familiar with the major issues in translation theory and comparative literature.

This course teaches beginning Chinese language. The course teaches grammar, vocabulary, and expressions through tasks focused on developing the ability to communicate in Chinese. This course enables students to develop skills in understanding, speaking, reading and writing basic Chinese, while increasing their awareness of the Chinese speaking world.  By the end of the semester, students are expected to have mastered pronunciation, basic grammar and possess enough vocabulary to manage to communicate in daily life, using simple Chinese expressions. Equal emphasis is placed on the four (listening, speaking, writing and reading) skills.

This introductory course focuses on learning characters and pronunciation, while also studying basic grammar through simple daily conversations.

This course studies the history of English literature, exploring key texts from each literary period, and examines English literary texts from cultural and social perspectives. In particular, the course analyzes literary classics such as Beowulf and works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro, situating them in their cultural and social contexts.

This course provides a historical and analytical approach to international relations between Japan, Spain and Latin America.  It reflects on the evolution of international relations, as well as their state of affairs today, and their potential projection in the future.

The international community has become more globalized - increasingly become more interdependent and enhancing opportunities for people to acknowledge their common humanity across arbitrarily drawn political borders and cultural divides. What does the term "globalization" really mean? How does it affect our lives? This course explains the various dimensions of globalization: cultural, economic, political and ecological. It also discusses the positive and negative effects of globalization as well as its future outlook.

This course introduces selected Japanese masterpieces in the hand-scroll (emaki ) format from the late-classical and medieval periods, while referencing other types of narrative imagery. The course considers how scholars approach these images from a variety of perspectives; how historical developments shape images and are reshaped by them, and visual storytelling techniques.

Constitutionalism is an idea that governmental power should be restrained by fundamental law. Many countries possess a written constitutional code, which is often seen as the fundamental law. This course examines how the idea of constitutionalism emerged in Japan and what it means today. The course also compares the Japanese constitution with constitutional law from other countries. 

This course analyzes the concepts and phenomena of cultural encounters and border-crossings in Spanish American societies, mainly through some of the fundamental works that were produced in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course examines where and how one can observe the phenomena and processes of cultural encounters and border-crossings in the texts while exploring the meaning of each aspect of these phenomena within a specific socio-historical and political context.

The course contemplates the following key questions: How does a culture travel and encounter another? How does it change its shape upon encountering other cultures? Is it possible to have the concept of a return to “the original” point of departure or the concept of “authenticity"?

This course teaches the basics of programming as part of the field of informatics. Programming is used in many areas today, such as software development, automation, and data analysis, so understanding its fundamentals is very important. This course discusses algorithms, data structures, and control flow, and provides opportunities to practice coding, debugging, and basic software design. The course aims to build a solid foundation in programming that supports future learning and career growth.