Thanks to their heterogeneity, the nine essays in this volume offer a clear testimony of Donald Davidson's authority, and they undoubtedly show how much his work - even if it has raised many doubts and criticisms - has been, and still is, highly influential and significant in contemporary analytical philosophy for a wide range of subjects. Moreover, the various articles not only critically and carefully analyze Davidson's theses and arguments (in particular those concerning language and knowledge), but they also illustrate how such theories and ideas, despite their unavoidable difficulties, are still alive and potentially fruitful. Davidon's work is indeed an important and provocative starting point for discussing the future progress of philosophy.

This volume explores the intersection between Translation Studies and History and Philosophy of Science to shed light on the workings of scientific communities, the dissemination of knowledge across languages and cultures, and the transformation in the process of that knowledge and of the scientific communities involved, among other issues. Through a diachronic approach, from some chapters focussing on early modernity to others that explore the final decades of the twentieth century, and by considering myriad languages, from Latin to Hindi, the twelve chapters of this volume reflect specifically on: (A) processes of the construction and dissemination of knowledge through the work of specific agents (whether individuals or collectives); (B) the implementation of particular linguistic strategies and visual tools in the translation of knowledge and in the diffusion of translated knowledge; and (C) the role of institutions and governments in the devising and implementation of translation policies, as well as the impact of these.

For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.

This book explores the ways in which reading and textual interpretation function as sources of knowledge.

A History of Modern Translation Knowledge is the first attempt to map the coming into being of modern thinking about translation. It breaks with the well-established tradition of viewing history through the reductive lens of schools, theories, turns or interdisciplinary exchanges. It also challenges the artificial distinction between past and present and it sustains that the latter’s historical roots go back far beyond the 1970s. Translation Studies is but part of a broader set of discourses on translation we propose to label “translation knowledge”. This book concentrates on seven processes that make up the history of modern translation knowledge: generating, mapping, internationalising, historicising, analysing, disseminating and applying knowledge. All processes are covered by 58 domain experts and allocated over 55 chapters, with cross-references. This book is indispensable reading for advanced Master- and PhD-students in Translation Studies who need background information on the history of their field, with relevance for Europe, the Americas and large parts of Asia. It will also interest students and scholars working in cultural and social history.

In this study, the author addresses the questions of what constitutes the knowledge of language, and how this knowledge is acquired and used.

Language Interpretation and Communication: a NATO Symposium, was a multi-disciplinary meeting held from September 26 to October 1st 1977 at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The Symposium explored both applied and theoretical aspects of conference interpre tation and of sign language interpretation. The Symposium was sponsored by the Scientific Affairs Division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and we would like to express our thanks to Dr. B. A. Bayrakter of the Scientific Affairs Division and to the Members of the NATO Special Programme Panel on Human Factors for their support. We would also like to thank Dr. F. Benvenutti and his colleagues at the University of Venice for their generous provision of facilities and hospitality for the opening session of the Symposium. Our thanks are also due to Dr. Ernesto Talentino and his colleagues at the Giorgio Cini Foundation who provided such excellent conference facilities and thus helped ensure the success of the meeting. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation and thanks to Becky Graham and Carol Blair for their invaluable contributions to the organization of the Symposium, to Ida Stevenson who prepared these proceedings for publication, and to Donald I. MacLeod who assisted with the final preparation of the manuscript.

Izydora Dąmbska (1904-1982) was a Polish philosopher; a student of Kazimierz Twardowski, and his last assistant. Her output consists of almost 300 publications. The main domains of her research were semiotics, epistemology and broadly understood methodology as well as axiology and history of philosophy. Dąmbska’s approach to philosophical problems reflected tendencies that were characteristic of the Lvov-Warsaw School. She applied high methodological standards but has never limited the domain of analyzed problems in advance. The present volume includes twenty-eight translations of her representative papers. As one of her pupils rightly wrote: “Dąmbska’s works may help everyone [...] to think clearly. Her attitude of an unshaken philosopher may help anyone to hold oneself straight, and, if necessary, to get up after a fall”.

The Evolving Curriculum in Interpreter and Translator Education: Stakeholder perspectives and voices examines forces driving curriculum design, implementation and reform in academic programs that prepare interpreters and translators for employment in the public and private sectors. The evolution of the translating and interpreting professions and changes in teaching practices in higher education have led to fundamental shifts in how translating and interpreting knowledge, skills and abilities are acquired in academic settings. Changing conceptualizations of curricula, processes of innovation and reform, technology, refinement of teaching methodologies specific to translating and interpreting, and the emergence of collaborative institutional networks are examples of developments shaping curricula. Written by noted stakeholders from both employer organizations and academic programs in many regions of the world, the timely and useful contributions in this comprehensive, international volume describe the impact of such forces on the conceptual foundations and frameworks of interpreter and translator education.

For humans, understanding a natural language sentence or discourse is so effortless that we hardly ever think about it. For machines, however, the task of interpreting natural language, especially grasping meaning beyond the literal content, has proven extremely difficult and requires a large amount of background knowledge. This book focuses on the interpretation of natural language with respect to specific domain knowledge captured in ontologies. The main contribution is an approach that puts ontologies at the center of the interpretation process. This means that ontologies not only provide a formalization of domain knowledge necessary for interpretation but also support and guide the construction of meaning representations. We start with an introduction to ontologies and demonstrate how linguistic information can be attached to them by means of the ontology lexicon model lemon. These lexica then serve as basis for the automatic generation of grammars, which we use to compositionally construct meaning representations that conform with the vocabulary of an underlying ontology. As a result, the level of representational granularity is not driven by language but by the semantic distinctions made in the underlying ontology and thus by distinctions that are relevant in the context of a particular domain. We highlight some of the challenges involved in the construction of ontology-based meaning representations, and show how ontologies can be exploited for ambiguity resolution and the interpretation of temporal expressions. Finally, we present a question answering system that combines all tools and techniques introduced throughout the book in a real-world application, and sketch how the presented approach can scale to larger, multi-domain scenarios in the context of the Semantic Web. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Ontologies / Linguistic Formalisms / Ontology Lexica / Grammar Generation / Putting Everything Together / Ontological Reasoning for Ambiguity Resolution / Temporal Interpretation / Ontology-Based Interpretation for Question Answering / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies