Translation Criticism

Lance Hewson's book on translation criticism sets out to examine ways in which a literary text may be explored as a translation, not primarily to judge it, but to understand where the text stands in relation to its original by examining the interpretative potential that results from the translational choices that have been made. After considering theoretical aspects of translation criticism, Hewson sets out a method of analysing originals and their translations on three different levels. Tools are provided to describe translational choices and their potential effects, and applied to two corpora: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and six of the English translations, and Austen's Emma, with three of the French translations. The results of the analyses are used to construct a hypothesis about each translation, which is classified according to two scales of measurement, one distinguishing between "just" and "false" interpretations, and the other between "divergent similarity", "relative divergence", "radical divergence" and "adaptation".

Katharina Reiss's now classic contribution to Translation Studies, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik: Kategorien und Kriteren für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen, first appeared in 1971. This is the first English translation of this major work, allowing students and practitioners of translation in the English-speaking world to make more extensive use of Reiss's pioneering treatment of a central theme in translation: how to develop reliable criteria for the systematic evaluation of translations. Using a wealth of interesting and varied examples, Reiss offers a systematic and illuminating text typology, a pragmatic approach to text analysis, a functional perspective on translation and a hermeneutic view of the translator, thus accounting for some of the most important aspects of the translation process: the text (both source and target versions), the conditions which determine the translator's decisions, and the translator as an individual whose personal interpretation has to be respected by any critic. In the three decades since Katharina Reiss wrote, the terminology of translation studies has evolved on many fronts. Erroll Rhodes' translation strikes an optimal balance between remaining faithful to the original presentation and using terminology that today's reader would generally understand and value.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. “Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author’s voice—she has something powerful to say.” —Entertainment Weekly When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied neighborhood, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. Petrona is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy. Inspired by the author's own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

Themes, places, characters and voices of Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobie’s Riddle are explored in detail in this monograph, which provides different narratological and translational analyses of the novel, as well as an academic translation into Italian. Considering the challenges and issues posited by a literary work’s translation helps to shed light on the original work itself. In this manner, the translation is to be seen as a further analytical instrument to gain insight into the original novel. The purpose of this work is to obtain a deeper understanding of the complicated microcosm created by Jolley in the nursing home of “St Christopher and St Jude”: the typically Australian themes of migration, isolation, place and displacement; the Australian culture-specific elements; the ensemble of curious characters and their entertaining voices. This book strives to preserve the above elements in translation as the expression of something Other, a different culture, and to take Italian readers on a journey to the Australia depicted in Mr Scobie’s Riddle so that Jolley’s characters’ voices can echo in the Italian language.

Françoise Massardier-Kenney's translation of Antoine Berman's Toward a Translation Criticism makes available for the first time in the English-speaking world one of the twentieth-century's foundational texts in translation studies. Berman's book, published posthumously in France, develops an original concept of "criticism of translation" and a methodology to anchor the practice of this criticism. He demonstrates how the work of translation is a critical process as well as a creative one. Moving away from nonsystematic evaluative approaches that focus on the shortcomings of translations or the normative approaches that study the cultural and literary systems into which the translations are inserted, Berman applies the notion of ethics he developed in his earlier works, calling for a translation that is nonethnocentric and stipulating that the creativity required by translation be focused on the re-creation of the original in the other language without being over-determined by the personal poetics of the writer-translator. Berman achieves a rare combination of hermeneutic and stylistic analysis, of commentary on the original and analysis of its translations, giving the reader access both "to the language of the original--to the way in which poetry and thought are deployed--and to the actual work of translation." Toward a Translation Criticism is divided into two separate but interlinked parts, each focused on one element of the ethics of translation: theory (reflection) and practice (experience). In the first part Berman presents what he calls a general "productive criticism," while in the second part he applies the general theoretical principles of this criticism to the analysis of the translations of John Donne's work into French and Spanish. The translation of Berman's text is accompanied by an introduction placing Berman's thought in its intellectual context and by supplementary notes that complete the bibliographic material presented in the French-language version. This study is essential reading for translation studies scholars, readers interested in the creative literary process, in the nature of literary criticism, andin the philosophy of language. It will also be of interest to John Donne specialists.

Katharina Reiss's now classic contribution to Translation Studies, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik: Kategorien und Kriteren für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen, first appeared in 1971. This is the first English translation of this major work, allowing students and practitioners of translation in the English-speaking world to make more extensive use of Reiss's pioneering treatment of a central theme in translation: how to develop reliable criteria for the systematic evaluation of translations. Using a wealth of interesting and varied examples, Reiss offers a systematic and illuminating text typology, a pragmatic approach to text analysis, a functional perspective on translation and a hermeneutic view of the translator, thus accounting for some of the most important aspects of the translation process: the text (both source and target versions), the conditions which determine the translator's decisions, and the translator as an individual whose personal interpretation has to be respected by any critic. In the three decades since Katharina Reiss wrote, the terminology of translation studies has evolved on many fronts. Erroll Rhodes' translation strikes an optimal balance between remaining faithful to the original presentation and using terminology that today's reader would generally understand and value.

White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate expectations for critical and analytic writing. White employs his unique approach by analyzing individual cases involving the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution and demonstrates how a judge translates the facts and the legal tradition, creating a text that constructs a political and ethical community with its readers. "White has given us not just a novel answer to the traditional jurisprudential questions, but also a new way of reading and evaluating judicial opinions, and thus a new appreciation of the liberty which they continue to protect."—Robin West, Times Literary Supplement "James Boyd White should be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, solely on the strength of this book. . . . Justice as Translation is an important work of philosophy, yet it is written in a lucid, friendly style that requires no background in philosophy. It will transform the way you think about law."—Henry Cohen, Federal Bar News & Journal "White calls us to rise above the often deadening and dreary language in which we are taught to write professionally. . . . It is hard to imagine equaling the clarity of eloquence of White's challenge. The apparently effortless grace of his prose conveys complex thoughts with deceptive simplicity."—Elizabeth Mertz, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities "Justice as Translation, like White's earlier work, provides a refreshing reminder that the humanities, despite the pummelling they have recently endured, can be humane."—Kenneth L. Karst, Michigan Law Review

The global/local distinction has changed significantly, and the topic has been heatedly debated in literary and cultural as well as translation scholarship. In this age of globalisation, the traditional definition of translation has been altered. In the present anthology, translation is viewed as a cultural and political practice, and accordingly translation studies is based on a heightened awareness of global/local tensions in translation and of its moderating and transforming impact on local cultural paradigms. All the essays in this anthology deal with issues of translation from a cultural and theoretic perspective with regard to tensions and conflicts between global and local interests and values. No matter how different their approaches may seem, the essays are thematically integrated to discuss translation in a dialectical framework: either “globalising” Chinese issues internationally, or “localising” general and international issues domestically.