This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

This book presents cutting-edge research in translation studies, offering stimulating discussions on translation and providing fresh perspectives on the field. Papers in Translation Studies features a selection of papers originally authored for this volume, addressing a variety of issues from different points of view and offering interesting contributions to the critical literature of the field. The volume provides useful resources that will be of great benefit for academics, students and practitioners. The contributions to this book promote research on translation theory and practice, and suggest ways of dealing with translation problems. The volume chapters are written by researchers from around the world, and consider various different languages and contexts. Areas of investigation include contrastive linguistics and translation, corpus-based translation studies, natural language processing, machine translation, and translator training.

Originally published in different journals and collected volumes, these papers in conceptual analysis cover some central topics in translation theory and research: types of theory and hypothesis; causality and explanation; norms, strategies and so-called universals; translation sociology, and ethics. There are critical reviews of Catford's theory, and of Skopos theory, and of Kundera's views on literary translation, and detailed analyses of the literal translation hypothesis and the unique items hypothesis. The methodological discussions, which draw on work in the philosophy of science, will be of special relevance to younger researchers, for example those starting work on a doctorate. Some of the arguments and positions defended - for instance on the significant status of conceptual, interpretive hypotheses, and the ideal of consilience - relate to wider ongoing debates, and will interest any scholar who is concerned about the increasing fragmentation of the field and about the future of Translation Studies. Let the dialogue continue!

The translator is one of the key elements in the practice of translation. However, the roles of the translator have long been overlooked and even denied in the history of translation studies, which has led to the invisibility of the translator. The reasons for the invisibility of the translator have been investigated in this book. With the emergence of new thoughts in philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science and linguistic theories, changes have occurred in the ideas about the roles of the translator and resulted in the visibility of the translator and the prominence of the subjectivity of the translator in translation studies. This book explores the changes from two major perspectives. One perspective is from structuralism and the objective standards applied in natural science and social sciences related to the translator’s invisibility. The other perspective is from hermeneutics, phenomenology, existentialism, the theory of power and discourse, embodied philosophy, relevance theory, and cognitive linguistics, all of which explain the subjectivity of the translator and support the viewpoint that the translator is active, rather than passive, in translation activities, and hence the visibility of the translator in translation studies.

This introductory textbook provides an accessible overview of the key contributions to translation theory. Jeremy Munday explores each theory chapter-by-chapter and tests the different approaches by applying them to texts. The texts discussed are taken from a broad range of languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese and English translations are provided. A wide variety of text types are analyzed, including a tourist brochure, a children's cookery book, a Harry Potter novel, the Bible, literary reviews and translators' prefaces, film translation, a technical text and a European Parliament speech. Each chapter includes the following features: a table introducing key concepts an introduction outlining the translation theory or theories illustrative texts with translations a chapter summary discussion points and exercises. Including a general introduction, an extensive bibliography, and websites for further information, this is a practical, user-friendly textbook that gives a balanced and comprehensive insight into translation studies.

A replacement of the author's well-known book on Translation Theory, In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980), this book makes a case for Descriptive Translation Studies as a scholarly activity as well as a branch of the discipline, having immediate consequences for issues of both a theoretical and applied nature. Methodological discussions are complemented by an assortment of case studies of various scopes and levels, with emphasis on the need to contextualize whatever one sets out to focus on.Part One deals with the position of descriptive studies within TS and justifies the author's choice to devote a whole book to the subject. Part Two gives a detailed rationale for descriptive studies in translation and serves as a framework for the case studies comprising Part Three. Concrete descriptive issues are here tackled within ever growing contexts of a higher level: texts and modes of translational behaviour — in the appropriate cultural setup; textual components — in texts, and through these texts, in cultural constellations. Part Four asks the question: What is knowledge accumulated through descriptive studies performed within one and the same framework likely to yield in terms of theory and practice?This is an excellent book for higher-level translation courses.

In the past decades, translation studies have increasingly focused on the ethical dimension of translational activity, with an emphasis on reflexivity to assert the role of the researcher in highlighting issues of visibility, creativity and ethics. In Reflexive Translation Studies, Silvia Kadiu investigates the viability of theories that seek to empower translation by making visible its transformative dimension; for example, by championing the visibility of the translating subject, the translator’s right to creativity, the supremacy of human translation or an autonomous study of translation. Inspired by Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, Kadiu presents practical ways of challenging theories that argue reflexivity is the only way of developing an ethical translation. She questions the capacity of reflexivity to counteract the power relations at play in translation (between minor and dominant languages, for example) and problematises affirmative claims about (self-)knowledge by using translation itself as a process of critical reflection. In exploring the interaction between form and content, Reflexive Translation Studies promotes the need for an experimental, multi-sensory and intuitive practice, which invites students, scholars and practitioners alike to engage with theory productively and creatively through translation.

This book introduces Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation to Translation Studies (TS) scholars. A term first used by Lydia Liu in her list of research interests, CTS is based perhaps on the model of Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Legal Studies, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario.

"In Mapping the Translator: A Study on Liang Shiqiu, the writer has studied Liang Shiqiu (1903-1987), who was not only a famous writer and important critic, but also one of the most prominent translators in China in the 20th century, most notably the first Chinese who finished the translation of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Based on the primary sources, this research covers issues related to the historical, cultural, cognitive and sociological dimensions of translator studies. It investigates Liang's translation poetics; the influences of possible patrons and professionals on him; the relationship between Liang's ideology, the dominant ideology and his translation; Liang's debates with Lu Xun about and beyond translation criteria, and whether there is inconsistency or possible contradiction in Liang's translation poetics. This book also analyses the similarities and differences between Liang Shiqiu and Wu Mi - two followers of Irving Babbitt - in terms of translation poetics, and further explores the reasons leading to such differences. This book is targeted towards scholars and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, in the fields of translation studies, Asian studies, Chinese studies, and literary studies"--