Objects Of Translation

Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.

Interdisciplinarity is significant in the age of globalization and digitalization. It creates new opportunities through comparison and analysis of different findings and methods. Furthermore, it expands the boundaries of each discipline: each topic or phenomenon can be viewed under a whole new light. Instead of conventional or traditional methods, interdisciplinary cooperation can lead to innovative approaches that can contribute to the value of each discipline involved. It also requires respect and recognition between disciplines: their independent positions could be questioned or justified based on their interrelationship. Moreover, interdisciplinary work brings together diverse experts who cooperate and share their findings with each other. In this sense, interdisciplinarity can be seen as a dialogue between disciplines. In this complex interaction, a 'third' field may emerge that transcends the boundaries of each independent discipline. Since relatively young Translation Studies has long been influenced by other disciplines, its boundaries could be defined through interdisciplinarity. In this book, numerous translation scholars engage with the relationship between translation and other disciplines. Translation here is not only to be understood as a transmission of texts, but in a broader sense, as denoting a transformation of different phenomena that could be studied both as a product and as a process.

Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.

The notion of systems has helped revolutionize translation studies since the 1970s. As a key part of many descriptive approaches, it has broken with the prescriptive focus on what translation should be, encouraging researchers to ask what translation does in specific cultural settings. From his privileged position as a direct participant in these developments, Theo Hermans explains how contemporary descriptive approaches came about, what the basic ideas were, and how those ideas have evolved over time. His discussion addresses the fundamental problems of translation norms, equivalence, polysystems and social systems, covering not only the work of Levý, Holmes, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lefevere, Lambert, Van Leuven-Zwart, Dhulst and others, but also giving special attention to recent contributions derived from Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann. An added focus on practical questions of how to investigate translation (problems of definition, description, assessment of readerships, etc.) makes this book essential reading for graduate students and indeed any researchers in the field. Hermans' account of descriptive translation studies is both informed and critical. At the same time, he demonstrates the strength of the basic concepts, which have shown considerable vitality in their evolution and adaptation to the debates of the present day.

Time, Space, Matter in Translation considers time, space, and materiality as legitimate habitats of translation. By offering a linked series of interdisciplinary case studies that show translation in action beyond languages and texts, this book provides a capacious and innovative understanding of what translation is, what it does, how, and where. The volume uses translation as a means through which to interrogate processes of knowledge transfer and creation, interpretation and reading, communication and relationship building—but it does so in ways that refuse to privilege one discipline over another, denying any one of them an entitled perspective. The result is a book that is grounded in the disciplines of the authors and simultaneously groundbreaking in how its contributors incorporate translation studies into their work. This is key reading for students in comparative literature—and in the humanities at large—and for scholars interested in seeing how expanding intellectual conversations can develop beyond traditional questions and methods.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology provides a state-of-the art survey of the field of computer-assisted translation. It is the first definitive reference to provide a comprehensive overview of the general, regional and topical aspects of this increasingly significant area of study. The Encyclopedia is divided into three parts: Part One presents general issues in translation technology, such as its history and development, translator training and various aspects of machine translation, including a valuable case study of its teaching at a major university; Part Two discusses national and regional developments in translation technology, offering contributions covering the crucial territories of China, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States Part Three evaluates specific matters in translation technology, with entries focused on subjects such as alignment, bitext, computational lexicography, corpus, editing, online translation, subtitling and technology and translation management systems. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology draws on the expertise of over fifty contributors from around the world and an international panel of consultant editors to provide a selection of articles on the most pertinent topics in the discipline. All the articles are self-contained, extensively cross-referenced, and include useful and up-to-date references and information for further reading. It will be an invaluable reference work for anyone with a professional or academic interest in the subject.