The Behavioral Economics Of Translation

This book applies frameworks from behavioral economics to Western thinking about translation, mapping four approaches to eight keywords in translation studies to bring together divergent perspectives on the study of translation and interpreting. The volume takes its points of departure from the tensions between the concerns of behavioral and neoclassical economists. The book considers on one side behavioral economists’ interest in the predictable irrationality of “Humans” and its nuances as they unfold in terms of gender, here organized around Masculine Human, Feminine Human, and Queer perspectives, and on the other side neoclassical economists’ chief concerns with the unfailing rationality of the “Econs.” Robinson applies these four approaches across eight chapters, each representing a keyword in the study of translation—agency; difference; Eurocentrism; hermeneutics; language; norms; rhetoric; and world literature—with case studies that problematize the different categories. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive treatment of the behavioral economics of translation and promotes new ways of thinking in the study of translation and interpreting, making it of interest to scholars in the discipline as well as those working along interdisciplinary lines in related fields such as philosophy, literature, and political science.

This is a book-length commentary on Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," best known in English under the title "The Task of the Translator." Benjamin’s essay is at once an immensely attractive work for top-flight theorists of translation and comparative literature and a frustratingly cryptic work that cries out for commentary. Almost every one of the claims he makes in it seems wildly counterintuitive, because he articulates none of the background support that would help readers place it in larger literary-historical contexts: Jewish mystical traditions from Philo Judaeus’s Logos-based Neoplatonism to thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah; Romantic and post-Romantic esotericisms from Novalis and the Schlegels to Hölderlin and Goethe; modernist avant-garde foreclosures on "the public" and generally the communicative contexts of literature. The book is divided into 78 passages, from one to a few sentences in length. Each of the passages becomes its own commentarial unit, consisting of a Benjaminian interlinear box, a paraphrase, a commentary, and a list of other commentators who have engaged the specific passage in question. Because the passages cover the entire text of the essay in sequence, reading straight through the book provides the reader with an augmented experience of reading the essay. Robinson’s commentary is key reading for scholars and postgraduate students of translation, comparative literature, and critical theory.

The text is designed as the main text for an undergraduate course in Behavioral Economics, which is a growing course for students of economics at the undergraduate level. The presentation is grounded in microeconomics and traditional economic models to discuss observed human behavior. The book presents models that show the trade-offs between material benefits and social concerns. The models incorporate social concerns such as altruism, guilt, exploitation, fairness, and cognitive dissonance. Unlike many other books on behavioral economics, the text is not a catalog of human quirks. Although the book highlights all sorts of observed behavior that appears irrational and misguided, it doesn't stop there. It examines the possible motives for the puzzling behavior. For many misguided and regrettable choices, we highlight actions taken to control the behavior and mitigate the damage. We use the insights of anthropologists and economists to explore the role of natural selection in shaping human thinking and behavior. A decision that appears irrational today may be understandable in the context of millions of years of natural selection. Recent work explores the role of natural selection in (i) loss aversion, (ii) the endowment effect, (iii) time preferences, and (iv) responses to the free-rider problem.

Behavioral Science in the Wild helps managers understand how best to incorporate key research findings to solve their own behavior change challenges in the real world – from lab to field. Behavioral Science in the Wild helps managers to implement research findings on behavioral change in their own workplace operations and to apply them to business or policy problems. As the second book in the Behaviourally Informed Organizations series, Behavioral Science in the Wild takes a step back to address the "why" and "how" behind the origins of behavioral insights, and how best to translate and scale behavioral science from lab-based research findings. Governments, for-profit enterprises, and welfare organizations have increasingly started relying on findings from the behavioral sciences to develop more accessible and user-friendly products, processes, and experiences for their end-users. While there is a burgeoning science that helps us to understand why people act and make the decisions that they do, and how their actions can be influenced, we still lack a precise science and strategic insights into how some key theoretical findings can be successfully translated, scaled, and applied in the field. Nina Mažar and Dilip Soman are joined by leading figures from both the academic and applied behavioral sciences to develop a nuanced framework for how managers can best translate results from pilot studies into their own organizations and behavior change challenges using behavioral science.

What can Finland’s greatest and supposedly least translatable novel tell us about translation and world literature?

Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time.

Choice, Behavioural Economics and Addiction is about the theory, data, and applied implications of choice-based models of substance use and addiction. The distinction between substance use and addiction is important, because many individuals use substances but are not also addicted to them. The behavioural economic perspective has made contributions to the analysis of both of these phenomena and, while the major focus of the book is on theories of addiction, it is necessary also to consider the behavioural economic account of substance use in order to place the theories in their proper context and provide full coverage of the contribution of behavioural economics to this field of study. The book discusses the four major theories of addiction that have been developed in the area of economic science/behavioural economics. They are: . hyperbolic discounting . melioration . relative addiction . rational addiction The main objective of the book is to popularise these ideas among addiction researchers, academics and practitioners. The specific aims are to articulate the shared and distinctive elements of these four theories, to present and discuss the latest empirical work on substance abuse and addiction that is being conducted in this area, and to articulate a range of applied implications of this body of work for clinical, public health and public policy initiatives. The book is based on an invitation-only conference entitled, Choice, Behavioural Economics and Addiction: Theory, Evidence and Applications held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, March 30 - April 1, 2001. The conference was attended by prominent scientists and scholars, representing a range of disciplines concerned with theories of addiction and their consequences for policy and practice. The papers in the book are based on the papers given at the above conference, together with commentaries by distinguished experts and, in many cases, replies to these comments by the presenters.

This is a book in the classical Quaestiones genre, like the Tusculanae Quaestiones (“Tusculan questions”) of Cicero (around 45 BCE) and the Quæstiones disputatæ de Veritate (“disputed questions on truth”) of St. Thomas Aquinas (1256-1259). It seeks to ask seven series of questions about key theoretical approaches to the study of translation: three on equivalence theories (semantic equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and deverbalization), three on Descriptive Translation Studies (norms, Toury’s laws, and the translator’s narratoriality), and one on the translator’s visibility. Each “Question” (chapter) charts a circuitous course through past answers to new questions and new answers, drawing especially on the theoretical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and 4EA cognitive science. The book will guide both veteran and novice scholars of translation deep into the complexities besetting the seven keywords.