Values In Translation

“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.

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.

This selection of 30 contributions (3 workshop reports, 27 papers from 14 countries) concentrates on intercultural communication in its broadest sense: themes vary from dissident translation under the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and translation as a process of power in the 3rd world context to drama translation and the role of the cognitive sciences in translation theory. Topics of current interest such as media interpreting, news translation, advertising, subtitling and the ethics of translation have a prominent position, as does the Workshop 'Contact as Conflict' which discusses the phenomenon of the hybrid text as a result of the translation process. The volume closes with the EST Focus debate on thorny issues of Methodology, Policy and Training. The volume demonstrates clearly the richness and breadth of the topics dealt with in Translation Studies today along with its complex interaction with neighbouring disciplines.

Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, deprecated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations. Lawrence Venuti exposes what he refers to as the 'scandals of translation' by looking at the relationship between translation and those bodies - corporations, governments, religious organizations, publishers - who need the work of the translator yet marginalize it when it threatens their cultural values. Venuti illustrates his arguments with a wealth of translations from The Bible, the works of Homer, Plato and Wittgenstein, Japanese and West African novels, advertisements and business journalism.

Memes of Translation is a search for coherence in translation theory based on the notion of Memes: ideas that spread, develop and replicate, like genes. The author explores a wide range of ideas on translation, mapping the “meme pool” of translation theory with chapters on translation history, norms, strategies, assessment, ethics, and translator training. The aim of the book is to search for a perspective from which the immense variety of ideas about translation can be related. The unifying thread is the philosophy of Karl Popper. The book proposes the beginnings of a Popperian theory of translation, based on the fundamental concepts of norms, strategies, and values. A key idea is that a translation itself is a theory or hypothesis concerning the source text. This hypothesis is then subjected to testing, refinement, and perhaps even rejection, just like any other hypothesis.

What do people think of translation in the different historical, cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside, both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not. But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact, the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports, the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously, the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect, the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.

Whether the judgements translators of different language works make are normative and somehow wrapped up in societal values that change with time or social positioning is the subject of these contributions. Two main contributions from English and Israeli scholars are presented which argue that the concept of norms should be the primary analytical tool for understanding everything from the choices of words to regularly appearing patterns in writing. Seven brief responses and counter-responses follow. Also included are the transcripts of two debates on the topic. Distributed by Taylor and Francis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR