Literary Translation

In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them.

Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms. Literary Translation introduces students to the components of the discipline and models the practice. Three concise chapters help to familiarize students with: what motivates the act of translation how to read and critique literary translations how to read for translation. A range of sustained case studies, both from existing sources and the author’s own research, are provided along with a selection of relevant tasks and activities and a detailed glossary. The book is also complemented by a feature entitled ‘How to get started in literary translation’ on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal (http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/). Literary Translation is an essential guidebook for all students of literary translation within advanced undergraduate and postgraduate/graduate programmes in translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages.

In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them. Written in a witty and easy to read style, the book’s hands-on approach will make it accessible to translators of any background. A significant portion of this Practical Guide is devoted to the question of how to go about finding an outlet for one’s translations.

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation provides an accessible, diverse and extensive overview of literary translation today. This next-generation volume brings together principles, case studies, precepts, histories and process knowledge from practitioners in sixteen different countries. Divided into four parts, the book covers many of literary translation’s most pressing concerns today, from teaching, to theorising, to translation techniques, to new tools and resources. Featuring genre studies, in which graphic novels, crime fiction, and ethnopoetry have pride of place alongside classics and sacred texts, The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation represents a vital resource for students and researchers of both translation studies and comparative literature.

This book, the first of its kind for an English-language audience, introduces a fresh perspective on the Polish literary translation landscape, providing unique insights into the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of Polish translation history. Employing a problem-based approach, the book creates a map of different research directions in the history of literary translation in Poland, highlighting a holistic perspective on the discipline’s development in the region. The four sections explore topics of particular interest in current translation research, including translation and cultural borderlands, the agency of women translators, translators as intercultural mediators, and the intersection of translation research and digital methods. The 15 contributions demonstrate the ways in which Polish culture has represented translated work in its own way, informed and shaped by socio-political changes in Polish history. At the same time, the volume situates Polish research in translation within the growing body of work on Central and Eastern European translation studies, as well as looking at them against the backdrop of the international development of the discipline. This collection offers a valuable addition to existing research on Western literary canons, making it key reading for scholars in translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and Slavonic studies.

This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

In their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors argue that constraints can be seen as a source of literary creativity, and given that translation is even more constrained than 'original' literary production, it thus has the potential to be even more creative too. The ten essays that follow outline ways in which translators and translations are constrained by poetic form, personal histories, state control, public morality, and the non-availability of comparable target language subcodes, and how translator creativity may-or may not-overcome these constraints. Topics covered are: Baudelaire's translation practices; bowdlerism in translations of Voltaire, Boccaccio and Shakespeare, among others; Leyris's translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins; ideology in English-Arabic translation; the translation of censored Greek poet Rhea Galanaki; theatre translation; Nabokov and translation; gay translation; Moratín's translation of Hamlet; and state control of translation production in Nazi Germany. The essays are mostly highly readable, and often entertaining.

Performing Without a Stage is a lively and comprehensive introduction to the art of literary translation for readers of foreign fiction and poetry who wonder what it takes to translate, how the art of literary translation has changed over the centuries, what problems translators face in bringing foreign works into English and how they go about solving these problems. This book will also be of interest to translators, writers, editors, critics, and literature students, dealing as it does, often controversially, with such matters as the translator's fidelity to the author, the publishing and reviewing of translations, the nearly nonexistent public image of the stageless translator, and the value for writers and scholars of studying and practicing translation.