Perspectives On Literature And Translation

This volume explores the relationship between literature and translation from three perspectives: the creative dimensions of the translation process; the way texts circulate between languages; and the way texts are received in translation by new audiences. The distinctiveness of the volume lies in the fact that it considers these fundamental aspects of literary translation together and in terms of their interconnections. Contributors examine a wide variety of texts, including world classics, poetry, genre fiction, transnational literature, and life writing from around the world. Both theoretical and empirical issues are covered, with some contributors approaching the topic as practitioners of literary translation, and others writing from within the academy.

This collection serves as a showcase for literary translation research with a focus on African perspectives, highlighting theoretical and methodological developments in the discipline while shedding further light on the literary landscape in Africa. The book offers a framework for understanding key approaches and topics in literary translation situated in the African context, covering foundational concepts as well as new directions within the field. The first half of the volume focuses on the translation product, exploring such topics as translation strategies, literary genres, and self-translation, while the second half examines process and reception, allowing for an in-depth look at agency, habitus, and ethics. Each chapter is structured to allow for the introduction of a given theoretical aspect of literary translation followed by a summary of a completed research project with an African focus showing theory in practice, offering a model for readers to build their own literary translation research projects while also underscoring the range of perspectives and unique challenges to literary translation work in Africa. This unique volume is a key resource for students and scholars in translation studies, giving visibility to African perspectives on literary translation while pointing the way forward for future research directions.

This volume is a collection of studies on the issue of authorship in translation. Leading translation scholars and professional translators discuss the theoretical implications and applicability of the author-translator paradigm. The relationship between translators and authors is addressed in its various manifestations, from the author-translator collaboration, to self-translation, to authorial practices of translating. While offering multiple perspectives, in terms of both theoretical approaches and cultural backgrounds, the volume offers an important and original contribution to the current debate.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Canadian federal governments offered varying degrees of support for literary and other artistic endeavour. A corollary of this patronage of culture at home was an effort to make the resulting works available for audiences elsewhere in the world. Current developments in the study of translation and its influence as cultural transfer have made possible new assessments of such efforts to project a national image abroad. Translating Canada examines cultural materials exported by Canada in addition to those selected for acquisition by German publishers, theatres, and other culture brokers. It also considers the motivations of particular translators and the reception by German reviewers of works by a wide variety of Canadian writers -- novelists and poets, playwrights and children's authors, literary and social critics. Above all, the book maps for its readers a number of significant, though frequently unsuspected, roles that translation assumes in the intercultural negotiation of national images and values. The chapters in this collection will be of value to students, teachers, and scholars in a number of fields. Informed lay readers, too, will appreciate the authors’ insights into the different ways in which translation has contributed to German reception of Canadian books and culture.

Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators. This book will be useful to scholars and students working on translation and cultural studies, China/Taiwan literature studies, and literature studies in cross-cultural contexts.

Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods explores retranslation from a variety of aspects and reflects methodological and theoretical developments in the field. Featuring eleven chapters, each offering a unique approach, the book presents a well-rounded analysis of contemporary issues in retranslation. It brings together case studies and examples from a range of contexts including France, the UK, Spain, the US, Brazil, Greece, Poland, modern Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire. The chapters highlight a diversity of cultural settings and illustrate the assumptions and epistemologies underlying the manifestations of retranslation in various cultures and time periods. The book expressly challenges a Eurocentric view and treats retranslation in all of its complexity by using a variety of methods, including quantitative and statistical analysis, bibliographical studies, reception analysis, film analysis, and musicological, paratextual, textual, and norm analysis. The chapters further show the dominant effect of ideology on macro and micro translation decisions, which comes into sharp relief in the specific context of retranslation.

Perspectives on Translation and Interpretation in Cameroon is the first volume of a book series of the Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters (ASTI) of the University of Buea. It opens a window into the wide dynamic and interesting area of translation and interpretation in a multilingual Cameroon that had on the eve of independence and unification opted for official bilingualism in French and English. The book comprises contributions from scholars of translation in the broad area of translation, comprising: the concept of translation and its pedagogy, the history of translation and, the state of the art of translation as a discipline, profession and practice. The book also focuses on acquisition of translation competences through training, and chronicles the history of translation in Cameroon through the contributions of both Cameroonian and European actors from the German through the French and English colonial periods to the postcolonial present in their minutia. Rich, original and comprehensive, the book is a timely and invaluable contribution to the growing community of translators and interpreters in Africa and globally.

Through close readings of select stories and novels by well-known writers from different literary traditions, Fictional Translators invites readers to rethink the main clichés associated with translations. Rosemary Arrojo shines a light on the transformative character of the translator’s role and the relationships that can be established between originals and their reproductions, building her arguments on the basis of texts such as the following: Cortázar’s "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" Walsh’s "Footnote" Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Poe’s "The Oval Portrait" Borges’s "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Funes, His Memory," and "Death and the Compass" Kafka’s "The Burrow" and Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Babel’s "Guy de Maupassant" Scliar’s "Footnotes" and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Cervantes’s Don Quixote Fictional Translators provides stimulating material for reflection not only on the processes associated with translation as an activity that inevitably transforms meaning, but, also, on the common prejudices that have underestimated its productive role in the shaping of identities. This book is key reading for students and researchers of literary translation, comparative literature and translation theory.