Translating Values

This collection explores the central importance of values and evaluative concepts in cross-cultural translational encounters. Written by a group of international scholars from a diverse range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the chapters in this book consider what it means to translate cultures by examining core values and their relationship to key evaluative concepts (such as authenticity, clarity, home, honour, or justice) and how they influence the complex multidimensional process of translation. This book will be of interest to academics studying cross-cultural and inter-linguistic interactions, to translators and interpreters, students of translation and of modern languages, and all those dealing with multilingual and multicultural settings.

“Cogently analyzes the culture of the [World] Bank to explain successes and failures in the adoption of human rights norms . . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice The World Bank is the largest lender to developing countries, making loans worth over $20 billion per year to finance development projects around the globe. To guide its investments, the Bank has adopted a number of social and environmental policies, yet it has never instituted any overarching policy on human rights. Despite the potential human rights impact of Bank projects—the forced displacement of indigenous peoples resulting from a Bank-financed dam project, for example—the issue of human rights remains marginal in the Bank’s operational practices. Values in Translation analyzes the organizational culture of the World Bank and addresses the question of why it has not adopted a human rights framework. Academics and social advocates have typically focused on legal restrictions in the Bank’s Articles of Agreement. This work’s anthropological analysis sheds light on internal obstacles—including the employee incentive system and a clash of expertise between lawyers and economists over how to define human rights and justify their relevance to the Bank’s mission.

Postmonolingualism, as formulated by Yildiz, can be understood to be a resistance to the demands of institutions that seek to enforce a monolingual standard. Complex identities, social practices, and cultural products are increasingly required to conform to the expectancies of a norm that for many is no longer considered reasonable. Thus, in this postmonolingual age, it is essential that the approaches and initiatives used to counter these demands aim not only to understand these hyper-diverse societies but also to deminoritize underprivileged communities. ‘Translating and Interpreting Justice in a Postmonolingual Age’ is an attempt to expand the limits of postmonolingualism as a framework for exploring the possibilities of translation and interpreting in mediating between the myriad of sociocultural communities that coexist today. Challenging assumptions about the role of translation and interpreting, the contributions gathered in this volume focus on intercultural and intergroup understanding as a process and as a requisite for social justice and ethical progress. From different but complementary approaches, practical experiences and existing legal and policy frameworks are scrutinized to highlight the need for translation and interpreting policies in legal and institutional contexts in multicultural societies. Researchers and policymakers in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, multiculturalism and education, and language and diversity policies will find inspiring perspectives on how legal and institutional translation and interpreting can help pursue the goals of democratic societies.

Dennis Washburn traces the changing character of Japanese national identity in the works of six major authors: Ueda Akinari, Natsume S?seki, Mori ?gai, Yokomitsu Riichi, ?oka Shohei, and Mishima Yukio. By focusing on certain interconnected themes, Washburn illuminates the contradictory desires of a nation trapped between emulating the West and preserving the traditions of Asia. Washburn begins with Ueda's Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) and its preoccupation with the distant past, a sense of loss, and the connection between values and identity. He then considers the use of narrative realism and the metaphor of translation in Soseki's Sanshiro; the relationship between ideology and selfhood in Ogai's Seinen; Yokomitsu Riichi's attempt to synthesize the national and the cosmopolitan; Ooka Shohei's post-World War II representations of the ethical and spiritual crises confronting his age; and Mishima's innovative play with the aesthetics of the inauthentic and the artistry of kitsch. Washburn's brilliant analysis teases out common themes concerning the illustration of moral and aesthetic values, the crucial role of autonomy and authenticity in defining notions of culture, the impact of cultural translation on ideas of nation and subjectivity, the ethics of identity, and the hybrid quality of modern Japanese society. He pinpoints the persistent anxiety that influenced these authors' writings, a struggle to translate rhetorical forms of Western literature while preserving elements of the pre-Meiji tradition. A unique combination of intellectual history and critical literary analysis, Translating Mount Fuji recounts the evolution of a conflict that inspired remarkable literary experimentation and achievement.

The relevance of translation has never been greater. The challenges of the 21st century are truly glocal and societies are required to manage diversities like never before. Cultural and linguistic diversities cut across ideological systems, those carefully crafted to uphold prevailing hierarchies of power, making asymmetries inescapable. Translation and interpreting studies have left behind neutrality and have put forward challenging new approaches that provide a starting point for researching translation as a cultural and historical product in a global and asymmetrical world. This book addresses issues arising from the power vested in and arrogated by translation and interpreting either as instruments of change, or as tools to sustain dominant structures. It presents new perspectives and cutting-edge research findings on how asymmetries are fashioned, woven, upheld, experienced, confronted, resisted, and rewritten through and in translation. This volume is useful for scholars looking for tools to raise awareness as to the challenges posed by the pervasiveness of power relations in mediated communication. It will further help practitioners understand how asymmetries shape their experiences when translating and interpreting.

The definition of value or quality with respect to work in translation has historically been a particularly vexed issue. Today, however, the growing demand for translations in such fields as technology and business and the increased scrutiny of translators' work by scholars in many disciplines is giving rise to a need for more nuanced, more specialized, and more explicit methods of determining value. Some refer to this determination as evaluation, others use the term assessment. Either way, the question is one of measurement and judgement, which are always unavoidably subjective and frequently rest on criteria that are not overtly expressed. This means that devising more complex evaluative practices involves not only quantitative techniques but also an exploration of the attitudes, preferences, or individual values on which criteria are established. Intended as an interrogation and a critique that can serve to prompt a more thorough and open consideration of evaluative criteria, this special issue of The Translator offers examinations of diverse evaluative practices and contains both empirical and hermeneutic work. Topics addressed include the evaluation of student translations using more up-to-date and positive methods such as those employed in corpus studies; the translation of non?standard language; translation into the second language; terminology; the application of theoretical criteria to practice; a social?textual perspective; and the reviewing of literary translations in the press. In addition, reviews by a number of literary translators discuss specific translations both into and out of English.

Weiss examines texts that reference Asian, North African, or Middle Eastern societies and their imaginaries, and, equally important, engage questions of individual and communal identity that issue from transformative encounters.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics offers a comprehensive overview of issues surrounding ethics in translating and interpreting. The chapters chart the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of ethical thinking in Translation Studies and analyze the ethical dilemmas of various translatorial actors, including translation trainers and researchers. Authored by leading scholars and new voices in the field, the 31 chapters present a wide coverage of emerging issues such as increasing technologization of translation, posthumanism, volunteering and activism, accessibility and linguistic human rights. Many chapters provide the first extensive overview of the topic or present new takes on established areas. The book is divided into four parts, with the first covering the most influential ethical theories. Part II takes the perspective of agents in different contexts and the ethical dilemmas they face, while Part III takes a critical look at central institutions structuring and controlling ethical behaviour. Finally, Part IV focuses on special issues and new challenges, and signals new directions for further study. This handbook is an indispensable resource for all students and researchers of translation and ethics within translation and interpreting studies, multilingualism and comparative literature.