Translating Texts

Intended for both students and teachers of translation, and professional translators, this book offers an introduction to problems of and strategies for translating Japanese texts. It focuses on Japanese and English and attempts to highlight differences between these two languages.

Clear and accessible, this textbook provides a step-by-step guide to textual analysis for beginning translators and translation students. Covering a variety of text types, including business letters, recipes, and museum guides in six languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish), this book presents authentic, research-based materials to support translation among any of these languages. Translating Texts will provide beginning translators with greater text awareness, a critical skill for professional translators. Including discussions of the key theoretical texts underlying this text-centred approach to translation and sample rubrics for (self) assessment, this coursebook also provides easy instructions for creating additional corpora for other text types and in other languages. Ideal for both language-neutral and language-specific classroom settings, this is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate-level programs in modern languages and translation. Additional resources are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://routledgetranslationstudiesportal.com

The notion of voice has been used in a number of ways within Translation Studies. Against the backdrop of these different uses, this book looks at the voices of translators, authors, publishers, editors and readers both in the translations themselves and in the texts that surround these translations. The various authors go on a hunt for translational agents’ voice imprints in a variety of textual and contextual material, such as literary and non-literary translations, book reviews, newspaper articles, academic texts and e-mails. While all stick to the principle of studying text and context together, the different contributions also demonstrate how specific textual and contextual circumstances require adapted methodological solutions, ending up in a collection that takes steps in a joint direction but that is at the same time complex and pluralistic. The book is intended for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and other disciplines within Language and Literature.

The translation of promotional and advertising texts requires the application of techniques which, although they vary depending on the specific text type, are all aimed at preserving their persuasive purpose. This often requires in-depth cultural adaptation and, on occasion, thorough rewriting. Translating Promotional and Advertising Texts covers the key types of promotional texts, including personal, business-to-business, institutional, business-to-consumer, and advertising. With numerous examples from a wide variety of languages and media, taken from the author's own professional experience and observations, this volume is designed for use as a coursebook for classroom practice or as a handbook for self-learning. It also provides insight for research into promotional and advertising translation. This second, updated edition offers entirely new sections on self-promotion in social media, text analysis, and tools for the cross-cultural appraisal of promotional texts. Revised with new examples, a glossary of terms, and activities and tasks on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal, this is the essential text for students, researchers, translators, and professionals working in copywriting, marketing, public relations, or related areas.

This volume brings together twenty-two of the world's leading translation and interpreting theorists, to address the issue of sensitivity in translation. Whether in novels or legal documents, the Bible or travel brochures, in translating ancient texts or providing simultaneous interpretation, sensitive subject-matter, contentious modes of expression and the sensibilities of the target audience are the biggest obstacles to acceptance of the translator's work. The contributors bring to bear a wide variety of approaches - generative, cognitive, lexical and functional - in confronting this problem, and in negotiating the competing claims of source cultures and target cultures in the areas of cultural, political, religious and sexual sensitivity. All of the articles are presented here for the first time, and in his Introduction Karl Simms gives an overview of the philosophical and linguistic questions which have motivated translators of sensitive texts through the ages. This book will be of interest to all working translators and interpreters, and to teachers of translation theory and practice.

Through close examination of references to gender identity, female sexuality and corporeality, this book is the first of its kind to shed light on the complexities of translating the recent transgressive turn in contemporary women’s writing in French. Via four case studies, namely, the translations into English of Nelly Arcan’s Putain (2001), Catherine Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Nancy Huston’s Infrarouge (2010) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000), this book explores how transgressive topoi such as prostitution, anorexia, matrophobia, rape, female desire, and transgenderism are translated. The book considers how (auto)fictional female selves portrayed are dis/placed by translation at both a textual and paratextual level. Combining feminist phenomenological perspectives on female lived experience with feminist translation theory, this interdisciplinary study offers an insight into how the experiential is brought into language, how it journeys via language into new cultural contexts via translation and creates a dialogical space in which the subjectivities of those involved (author, narrator, protagonist, translator) become open to the porosity of encounters with alterity. The volume will appeal to scholars in translation studies, French Studies, and gender and sexuality studies, particularly those interested in feminist translation and literary translation.

This engaging step-by-step guide prescribes effective strategies and tactics for translating a wide range of songs and other vocal music, from classical to contemporary. Focusing on best practice and with a variety of language examples, the book centres on four key themes: translating songs for a range of recipients and within different contexts (skopos theory) translating songs for reading on paper or on screens (surtitles and subtitles) "singable translations" and the Pentathlon Approach translating expressive texts. With a substantial introduction, six insightful chapters, further reading and a glossary of key terms (also available at https://www.routledge.com/9781138641792 and on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal), this lively and clear student-friendly guide is essential for students, researchers and practitioners involved in or studying the practice of translating music. This will also be an engaging read for musicians and all those interested in the study of music.