translation studies essay

The Importance of Translation Studies

Introduction

Translation Studies is a field of study that deals with the theory, description, and application of translation. Because it examines translation both as an interlingual transfer, and as an intercultural communication, Translation Studies can also be described as an inter-discipline which touches on other diverse fields of knowledge, including comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, computer science, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotics.

The skills of translation are becoming ever more important and desirable. Today’s multicultural and multilingual society demands effective, efficient, and empathetic communication between languages and cultures. That’s important for various reasons, which we’ll now explore.

Not Everybody Speaks English

English is the most prominent language in the world. As a result, one might question the importance of translation, and ask, why doesn’t everybody just speak English ?

The reality, however, is that not everybody can speak English, fewer still are able to speak it well enough to communicate effectively, and perhaps even more importantly: language is much more than the communication of words. It is also an expression of culture, society, and belief. Promoting a universal language, therefore, would likely lead to a loss of the culture and heritage communicated through native languages.

It Enables A Global Economy

As communication and travel advance, geography is becoming less and less of a barrier to doing business. Companies benefit from working overseas. They can take advantage of the lower cost of products and services in some countries, the professional and industrial expertise of others, and additional markets to trade in.

When they trade in countries with a different native language, they need high-quality translation to communicate effectively. When there’s a demand for translation there are opportunities for translators. When there’s a demand for translators, there’s a demand for Translation Studies. They need to learn the skills to practice at a high level, and perhaps even contribute to advancing the field even further.

Looking ahead, whilst English is the world’s most prominent language at the moment, it may not always be. When a market emerges and grows rapidly, like the Chinese market has in recent years, the demand for translation to and from its native language is also likely to increase.

The Spread of Information and Ideas

Translation is necessary for the spread of information, knowledge, and ideas. It is absolutely necessary for effective and empathetic communication between different cultures. Translation, therefore, is critical for social harmony and peace.

Translation is also the only medium through which people come to know different works that expand their knowledge. For example:

• Arabic translators were able to keep the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers alive throughout the Middle Ages
• The Bible has been translated into at least 531 languages
• Translation is helping sports teams and organisations overcome language barriers and transcend international boundaries
• TED Talks run open translation projects that allow people around the world to understand their talks, offering non-English speakers to learn from some of the best educators in the world.

The Role of Translation Studies

Effective, efficient, and empathetic translation requires highly skilled practitioners. Courses in Translation Studies are a great way for linguists, language graduates, and translators to develop a deep understanding of the academic field, and the skills to practice as a translation professional.

Translation enables effective communication between people around the world. It is a courier for the transmission of knowledge, a protector of cultural heritage, and essential to the development of a global economy. Highly skilled translators are key. Translation Studies helps practitioners develop those skills.

Further Reading

• MA Translation Studies at the University of Exeter .  A programme that provides a rigorous foundation in the academic field of Translation Studies, and an excellent professional training for careers in the language services industry.
• Bernack A (2012) The Importance of Translation Studies for Development Education . Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Issue 14 .  An interesting analysis of the role of the translator as a mediator between cultures.
• Lost in Translation? There’s a Whole Industry to Help.   An Inc magazine article about the growth of the translation industry and its importance to the world economy.
• Why Translation is Important In A World Where English is Everywhere  A great discussion about the relevance of translation when many around the world can speak English.

Recommended pages

• Undergraduate open days
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MA Translation Studies

Extended translation projects.

• English Translation of a mini-anthology of texts from the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Sportmedizin on the shared topic of marathon running , David Twyman

Dissertations

•  * Translation Types and Repetition: A Finnish Version of Psalm 49 Evaluated , Sirkku Carey
• * Strategies for Translating Idioms and Culturally-Bound Expressions Within the Human Development Genre , Noor Balfaqeeh
• * Acknowledging and establishing the hierarchy of expertise in translator-reviser scenarios as an aid to the process of revising translations ,  Spencer Allman
• * Upgrading Film Subtitling to the Level of Literary Translation , Alexandra Palmer 
• Norms in the Chinese translations of Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776) , Lung Jan Chan
• A study on the narrator's voice in the chinese translation of A Room of One's Own , Law Tsz   Sang
• The Use of Translation as a Teaching Technique within the Context of Learning English as a Foreign Language in Greece by Elena Arkadi.
• A Theological Approach to Equivalence: Comparing Judeo-Christian Belief with Shinto/Buddhist Thought by Dianne Cook.
• The Translation of Culture-Specific Items: An Analysis of Helen Fielding’s ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ and its Greek Translation by Dimitra Panagioutou.
• Analysis of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders and its Greek Translation by Eleni Panagioutou
• Medical Interpreting: Serving the Needs of Linguistic Minority Groups in the City of Birmingham by Alexandra Roupakia.
• Translating Behaviour in the Late Qing Period: A Case Study of Lin Shu and His Translation of Robinson Crusoe by Chan Iut Va
• Investigating the Issue of Translation Policy in a Multicultural Urban Setting: Birmingham  by Dominika Brzezina.
• The Subtitling of Film and the Strategies used in the Translation of Humour: An Evaluative Overview by Anastasia Doulakaki.
• Comparison and Contrast of Two Greek Translations of Tennesse Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire by Fotini Sagmatapoulou.
• *Anthologies of Modern Greek Poetry Translated into English (1974-2000): What the Introductions Say by Anna Tsapoga.
• Winnie the Pooh's Most Grand Adventure and Its Multi-media Translations into Greek by Sotiroula Yiasemi.
• Translating Culture-Specific References: A Study on Lu HSun's " The True Story of Ah Q" and Its English Translation by Siu Mui Yim
• Assessing Acceptability of a Translated Linguistics Book , by Ida Dewi.
• The Representation of Gender in Shakespeare's King Lear. A Critical Analysis of the English Text and Three Greek Translations , by Dimitra Kouskoubekou.
• * Media and Translation: The Influence of Cultural Views on the Translation of Newsweek into Japanese , by Chie Otani.
• Translation and Media: A Comparative Analysis of Cosmopolitan and its Greek Translation , by George Papaioannou.
• Translation Issues and Cultural Diversity in English - Greek Specialist Magazines , by Chrysanthi Pelekou.
• A History of Early Translation into Japanese: How the Translations Made in the Meiji Era Contributed to the Modernization of Japan , by Atsuko Takano.
• Translation Strategies for Dealing with Cultural Issues in Two Kimiiru Bible Versions and the Theological Implications of the Translation , by John Ataya.
• Translating Humour. A Comparative Analysis between English and Greek , by Emmanouela Fanouraki.
• The Translation of Metaphors in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger by Alexandra Geka.
• The Art of Translating Poetry - A Focus on Processes , by Kiriaki Mela
• A Discussion on the Translation of Slang and Taboo Words in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction , by Ioannis Melissopoulos.
• An Analysis of Cohesive Patterns in an English text and its Japanese Translation , by Miki Nakamura.
• Textual Issues in Translation. An Analysis of the Opening Section of a German Annual Report and its English Translation , by Konrad Schafer.
• News on the World Wide Web and Translation , by Man Yee Tai.
• Theme and Topic Translation: From English into Chinese , by Feng-Mei Chao.
• Intertextuality in Two of Cavafy's Poems and Their Translation into English , by Antigoni Kantrantzi.
• Transferring Dialect: An Analysis of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and its Greek Translation , by Eirini Koufaki.
• Information Selection and Cohesion: A Case Study of Thai Translations of English International News Broadcast on Channel 5 TV News , by Usana Larbprasertporn.
• European Parliamentary Debates: Interpersonal Choices and Translation , by Giovanna G. Marcelli.
• Gender and Translation. How Women are Represented in Language , by Yoshiko Shimizu.
• Translating Salina into English: Loss and Compensation , by Intan Safinaz Zainuddin.
• Across Culture - Taking the Translation of Food, Modes of Address and Animals as Examples in the Chinese version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , by Fu-Chi Chen.
• Training Interpreters: An Evaluation of USM Interpreting Courses , by Leelany Ayob.
• Wordplay in English and Italian. Written Adverts and the Implications for Translation , by Maria Antonietta Armao.
• Transferring Drama: A Study of Two Translations of Harold Pinter's Old Times into Greek , by Evangelia Chaidemenou.
• Cohesion: A Translation Perspective , by Adamantia Karali.
• The Role of the Court Interpreter , by Evan Nga-Shan Ng
• Transitivity and the Translation Process: An Examination of the Shifts that Occur in Translation from Italian to English , by Lorraine Quinn-Adriano.
• Loss and Compensation in Translation: An Analysis of a Japanese Text and Its Translations , by Tomoko Kudo.
• The Translations of Metaphors in Newspaper Articles (English <=> Greek) , by Dimitra Sorovou.
• The Translation of Address Forms from New Testament (Greek into Dobel) by John Hughes.
• A Study of Compensation: A Comparative Analysis of Two Spanish Translations of Ulysses , by Gema Echevarria.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Translation Studies

Translation Studies

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 15, 2017 • ( 3 )

The 1980s was a decade of consolidation for the fledgling discipline known as Translation Studies. Having emerged onto the world stage in the late 1970s, the subject began to be taken seriously, and was no longer seen as an unscientific field of enquiry of secondary importance. Throughout the 1980s interest in the theory and practice of translation grew steadily. Then, in the 1990s, Translation Studies finally came into its own, for this proved to be the decade of its global expansion. Once perceived as a marginal activity, translation began to be seen as a fundamental act of human exchange. Today, interest in the field has never been stronger and the study of translation is taking place alongside an increase in its practice all over the world.

The electronic media explosion of the 1990s and its implications for the processes of globalization highlighted issues of intercultural communication. Not only has it become important to access more of the world through the information revolution, but it has become urgently important to understand more about one’s own point of departure. For globalization has its antithesis, as has been demonstrated by the world-wide renewal of interest in cultural origins and in exploring questions of identity. Translation has a crucial role to play in aiding understanding of an increasingly fragmentary world. The translator, as the Irish scholar Michael Cronin has pointed out, is also a traveller, someone engaged in a journey from one source to another. The twenty-first century surely promises to be the great age of travel, not only across space but also across time.1 Significantly, a major development in translation studies since the 1970s has been research into the history of translation, for an examination of how translation has helped shape our knowledge of the world in the past better equips us to shape our own futures.

Evidence of the interest in translation is everywhere. A great many books on translation have appeared steadily throughout the past two decades, new journals of translation studies have been established, international professional bodies such as the European Society for Translation have come into being and at least half a dozen translation encyclopaedias have appeared in print, with more to follow. New courses on translation in universities from Hong Kong to Brazil, and from Montreal to Vienna offer further evidence of extensive international interest in translation studies. It shows no sign of slowing down in the twenty-first century.

With so much energy directed at further investigation of the phenomenon of translation, it is obvious that any such development will not be homogeneous and that different trends and tendencies are bound to develop. We should not be surprised, therefore, that consensus in translation studies disappeared in the 1990s. However, that has been followed by lively diversification that continues today around the world. During the 1980s, Ernst-August Gutt ’s relevance theory, the skopos theory of Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer , and Gideon Toury ’s research into pseudotranslation all offered new methods for approaching translation, while in the 1990s the enormous interest generated by corpus-based translation enquiry as articulated by Mona Baker opened distinct lines of enquiry that continue to flourish. Indeed, after a period in which research in computer translation seemed to have foundered, the importance of the relationship between translation and the new technology has risen to prominence and shows every sign of becoming even more important in the future. Nevertheless, despite the diversity of methods and approaches, one common feature of much of the research in Translation Studies is an emphasis on cultural aspects of translation, on the contexts within which translation occurs. Once seen as a sub-branch of linguistics, translation today is perceived as an inter-disciplinary field of study and the indissoluble connection between language and way of life has become a focal point of scholarly attention.

Literary studies have also moved on from an early and more elitist view of translation. As Peter France , editor of the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation points out:

Theorists and scholars have a far more complex agenda than deciding between the good and the bad; they are concerned, for instance, to tease out the different possibilities open to the translator, and the way these change according to the historical, social, and cultural context.

There is a growing body of research that reflects this newer, more complex agenda, for as research in Translation Studies increases and historical data become more readily available, so important questions are starting to be asked, about the role of translation in shaping a literary canon, the strategies employed by translators and the norms in operation at a given point in time, the discourse of translators, the problems of measuring the impact of translations and, most recently, the problems of determining an ethics of translation.

Perhaps the most exciting new trend of all is the expansion of the discipline of Translation Studies beyond the boundaries of Europe. In Canada, India, Hong Kong, China, Africa, Brazil and Latin America, the concerns of scholars and translators have diverged significantly from those of Europeans. More emphasis has been placed on the inequality of the translation relationship, with writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Tejaswini Niranjana and Eric Cheyfitz arguing that translation was effectively used in the past as an instrument of colonial domination, a means of depriving the colonized peoples of a voice. For in the colonial model, one culture dominated and the others were subservient, hence translation reinforced that power hierarchy. As Anuradha Dingwaney puts it,

The processes of translation involved in making another culture comprehensible entail varying degrees of violence, especially when the culture being translated is constituted as that of the “other”.3

In the 1990s two contrasting images of the translator emerged. According to one reading of the translator’s role, the translator is a force for good, a creative artist who ensures the survival of writing across time and space, an intercultural mediator and interpreter, a figure whose importance to the continuity and diffusion of culture is immeasurable. In contrast, another interpretation sees translation as a highly suspect activity, one in which an inequality of power relations (inequalities of economics, politics, gender and geography) is reflected in the mechanics of textual production. As Mahasweta Sengupta argues, translation can become submission to the hegemonic power of images created by the target culture: a cursory review of what sells in the West as representative of India and its culture provides ample proof of the binding power of representation; we remain trapped in the cultural stereotypes created and nurtured through translated texts.4

In the new millennium translation scholarship will continue to emphasize the unequal power relationships that have characterized the translation process. But whereas in earlier centuries this inequality was presented in terms of a superior original and an inferior copy, today the relationship is considered from other points of view that can best be termed post-colonial. Parallel to the exciting work of Indian, Chinese and Canadian translation scholars, writers such as Octavio Paz , Carlos Fuentes and Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos have called for a new definition of translation. Significantly, all these writers have come from countries located in the continent of South America, from former colonies engaged in reassessing their own past. Arguing for a rethinking of the role and significance of translation, they draw parallels with the colonial experience. For just as the model of colonialism was based on the notion of a superior culture taking possession of an inferior one, so an original was always seen as superior to its ‘copy’. Hence the translation was doomed to exist in a position of inferiority with regard to the source text from which it was seen to derive.

In the new, post-colonial perception of the relationship between source and target texts, that inequality of status has been rethought. Both original and translation are now viewed as equal products of the creativity of writer and translator, though as Paz pointed out, the task of these two is different. It is up to the writer to fix words in an ideal, unchangeable form and it is the task of the translator to liberate those words from the confines of their source language and allow them to live again in the language into which they are translated.5 In consequence, the old arguments about the need to be faithful to an original start to dissolve. In Brazil, the cannibalistic theory of textual consumption, first proposed in the 1920s, has been reworked to offer an alternative perspective on the role of the translator, one in which the act of translation is seen in terms of physical metaphors that stress both the creativity and the independence of the translator.6

Today the movement of peoples around the globe can be seen to mirror the very process of translation itself, for translation is not just the transfer of texts from one language into another, it is now rightly seen as a process of negotiation between texts and between cultures, a process during which all kinds of transactions take place mediated by the figure of the translator. Significantly, Homi Bhabha uses the term ‘translation’ not to describe a transaction between texts and languages but in the etymological sense of being carried across from one place to another. He uses translation metaphorically to describe the condition of the contemporary world, a world in which millions migrate and change their location every day. In such a world, translation is fundamental:

We should remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.7

Central to the many theories of translation articulated by nonEuropean writers are three recurring strategems: a redefinition of the terminology of faithfulness and equivalence, the importance of highlighting the visibility of the translator and a shift of emphasis that views translation as an act of creative rewriting. The translator is seen as a liberator, someone who frees the text from the fixed signs of its original shape making it no longer subordinate to the source text but visibly endeavouring to bridge the space between source author and text and the eventual target language readership. This revised perspective emphasizes the creativity of translation, seeing in it a more harmonious relationship than the one in previous models that described the translator in violent images of ‘appropriation’, ‘penetration’ or ‘possession’. The post-colonial approach to translation is to see linguistic exchange as essentially dialogic, as a process that happens in a space that belongs to neither source nor target absolutely. As Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon argue, ‘translations provide an especially revealing entry point into the dynamics of cultural identity-formation in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.’8

Until the end of the 1980s Translation Studies was dominated by the systemic approach pioneered by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury. Polysystems theory was a radical development because it shifted the focus of attention away from arid debates about faithfulness and equivalence towards an examination of the role of the translated text in its new context. Significantly, this opened the way for further research into the history of translation, leading also to a reassessment of the importance of translation as a force for change and innovation in literary history.

In 1995, Gideon Toury published Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond , a book that reassessed the polysystems approach disliked by some scholars for its over-emphasis on the target system. Toury maintains that since a translation is designed primarily to fill a need in the target culture, it is logical to make the target system the object of study. He also points out the need to establish patterns of regularity of translational behaviour, in order to study the way in which norms are formulated and how they operate. Toury explicitly rejects any idea that the object of translation theory is to improve the quality of translations: theorists have one agenda, he argues, while practitioners have different responsibilities. Although Toury ’s views are not universally accepted they are widely respected, and it is significant that during the 1990s there has been a great deal of work on translation norms and a call for greater scientificity in the study of translation.

Polysystems theory filled the gap that opened up in the 1970s between linguistics and literary studies and provided the base upon which the new interdisciplinary Translation Studies could build. Central to polysystems theory was an emphasis on the poetics of the target culture. It was suggested that it should be possible to predict the conditions under which translations might occur and to predict also what kind of strategies translators might employ. To ascertain whether this hypothesis was valid and to establish fundamental principles, case studies of translations across time were required, hence the emergence of what has come to be termed descriptive studies in translation. Translation Studies began to move out into a distinctive space of its own, beginning to research its own genealogy and seeking to assert its independence as an academic field.

Whereas previously the emphasis had previously been on comparing original and translation, often with a view to establishing what had been ‘lost’ or ‘betrayed’ in the translation process, the new approach took a resolutely different line, seeking not to evaluate but to understand the shifts of emphasis that had taken place during the transfer of texts from one literary system into another. Polysystems theory focused exclusively on literary translation, though it operated with an enlarged notion of the literary which included a broad range of items of literary production including dubbing and subtitling, children’s literature, popular culture and advertising.

Through a series of case studies, this broadening of the object of study led to a division within the group of translation scholars loosely associated with the polysystems approach. Some, such as Theo Hermans and Gideon Toury sought to establish theoretical and methodological parameters within which the subject might develop, and others such as André Lefevere and Lawrence Venuti began to explore the implications of translation in a much broader cultural and historical frame. Lefevere first developed his idea of translation as refraction rather than reflection, offering a more complex model than the old idea of translation as a mirror of the original. Inherent in his view of translation as refraction was a rejection of any linear notion of the translation process. Texts, he argued, have to be seen as complex signifying systems and the task of the translator is to decode and re-encode whichever of those systems is accessible.9 Lefevere noted that much of the theorizing about translation was based on translation practice between European languages and pointed out that problems of the accessibility of linguistic and cultural codes intensifies once we move out beyond Western boundaries. In his later work, Lefevere expanded his concern with the metaphorics of translation to an enquiry into what he termed the conceptual and textual grids that constrain both writers and translators, suggesting that

Problems in translating are caused at least as much by discrepancies in conceptual and textual grids as by discrepancies in languages.10

These cultural grids determine how reality is constructed in both source and target texts, and the skill of the translator in manipulating these grids will determine the success of the outcome. Lefevere argues that these cultural grids, a notion deriving from Pierre Bourdieu ’s notion of cultural capital, highlight the creativity of the translator, for he or she is inevitably engaged in a complex creative process.

Similarly, Venuti insists upon the creativity of the translator and upon the his or her visible presence in a translation.11 So important has research into the visibility of the translator become in the 1990s, that it can be seen as a distinct line of development within the subject as a whole. Translation according to Venuti, with its allegiance both to source and target cultures ‘is a reminder that no act of interpretation can be definitive’.12 Translation is therefore a dangerous act, potentially subversive and always significant. In the 1990s the figure of the subservient translator has been replaced with the visibly manipulative translator, a creative artist mediating between cultures and languages. In an important book that appeared in 1991, the translator of Latin American fiction, Suzanne Jill Levine playfully described herself as ‘a subversive scribe’, an image that prefigures Venuti’s view of the translator as a powerful agent for cultural change.13

Levine ’s book is indicative of another line of enquiry within Translation Studies that focuses on the subjectivity of the translator. Translation scholars such as Venuti, Douglas Robinson , Anthony Pym and Mary Snell-Hornby , translators who have written about their own work such as Tim Parks , Peter Bush , Barbara Godard and Vanamala Viswanatha , have all stressed in different ways the importance of the translator’s role. This new emphasis on subjectivity derives from two distinct influences: on the one hand, the growing importance of research into the ethics of translation, and on the other hand a much greater attention to the broader philosophical issues that underpin translation. Jacques Derrida ’s rereading of Walter Benjamin opened the flood-gates to a reevaluation of the importance of translation not only as a form of communication but also as continuity.14 Translation, it is argued, ensures the survival of a text. The translation effectively becomes the after-life of a text, a new ‘original’ in another language. This positive view of translation serves to reinforce the importance of translating as an act both of inter-cultural and inter-temporal communication. Who, for example, would have any access to the forgotten women poets of ancient Greece without translation, asks Josephine Balmer in her illuminating preface to her translations of classical women poets?15

The development of Translation Studies in the 1990s can best be seen as the establishment of a series of new alliances that brought together research into the history, practice and philosophy of translation with other intellectual trends. The links between Translation Studies and post-colonial theory represent one such alliance, as do the links between Translation Studies and corpus linguistics. Another significant alliance is that between Translation Studies and gender studies. For language, as Sherry Simon points out, does not simply mirror reality, but intervenes in the shaping of meaning.16 Translators are directly involved in that shaping process, whether the text they are dealing with is an instruction manual, a legal document, a novel or a classical drama. Just as Gender Studies have challenged the notion of a single unified concept of culture by asking awkward questions about the ways in which canonical traditions are formed, so Translation Studies, through its many alliances, asks questions about what happens when a text is transferred from source to target culture.

Source:  Translation Studies Third edition Susan Bassnett Routledge London and New York, 2002.

Notes 1 Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: travel, language, translation (Cork: Cork University Press) 2000. 2 Peter France, Translation Studies and Translation Criticism, in Peter France ed. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2000, p. 3. 3 Anuradha Dingwaney, Introduction: Translating ‘Third World’ Cultures, Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds. Between Languages and Cultures Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press) 1995, p. 4. 4 Mahasweta Sengupta, Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and Images of Power in Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds. Between Languages and Cultures. Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press) 1995, p. 172. 5 Octavio Paz, Translation: Literature and Letters, transl. Irene del Corral, in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet eds. Theories of Translation. An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1992, pp. 36–55. 6 For discussion of the cannibalistic metaphor, see Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds. Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (New York and London: Routledge) 2000. 7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge) 1994, p. 38. 8 Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon, ‘Shifting Grounds of Exchange’: B.M.Srikantaiah and Kannada Translation, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi eds. Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge) 1999, p. 162. 9 See: Andre Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge) 1992. 10 Andre Lefevere, Composing the other, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi eds. Postcolonial Translation. Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge) 1999, p. 76. 11 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge) 1995. 12 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (London and New York: Routledge) 1998, p. 46. 13 Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press) 1991. 14 Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, in J.Graham, ed. Difference in Translation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press) 1985. 15 Josephine Balmer, Classical Women Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books) 1997. 16 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London and New York: Routledge) 1996.

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Tags: André Lefevere , Anthony Pym , Anuradha Dingwaney , Augusto de Campos , Barbara Godard , Basil Hatim , Carlos Fuentes , Critical Readings in Translation Studies , Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond , Douglas Robinson , dynamic-equivalence Bible-translation theory , Ernst-August Gut , Eugene Nida , Hans Vermeer , Haroldo de Campos , Itamar Even-Zohar , J.C.Catford , Josephine Balmer , Katharina Reiss , Kirsten Malmkjaer , lan Mason , Lawrence Venuti , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Mahasweta Sengupta , Mary Snell-Hornby , Michael Cronin , Michael Halliday , Mona Baker , Octavio Paz , Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation , Peter Bush , Peter France , Peter Newmark , Polysystems Theory , relevance theory , Roger Bell , Sherry Simon , skopos theory , Tejaswini Niranjana , Theo Hermans , Tim Parks , Translation and Relevance , Translation Studies , Translation Theory , Vanamala Viswanatha , Wolfram Wilss

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Introduction: Where are we in Translation Studies

From the book constructing cultures.

• André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett
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Supplementary Materials

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Chapters in this book (14)

Reading in Translation

• Contributors
• Elena Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults”

Essays on Translation

• Reading Domenico Starnone
• READING NATALIA GINZBURG
• Translators on Books that Should be Translated
• Write for US

In this section we publish short essays on the art and craft of literary translation, on translation theory, on reading literature in translation, or reports from events on literary translation. Our goal is to introduce new ideas or reflect on old ones, to create a dialogue around issues in literary translation, and to keep you informed about happenings in the world of literary translation.

Translation and Its Present Contexts: On Translating Eudora Welty into Hebrew

By Reut Ben-Yaakov

A year ago, I was relatively new to the United States – living in Durham, North Carolina – when I found a copy of  The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty  in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library. I did not know Welty, but I took the book with me. I thought reading it could be a good way to get oriented. After reading some of it, I closed the book, but something in that story, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” asked me to translate it. I didn’t understand why. It is a somewhat problematic story, I thought. I felt uneasy.

Bibikhin’s Task of the Translator: Introducing “On the Problems of Determining the Essence of Translation “

By Margarita Marinova and Anna Alsufieva

Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a Russian philosopher, translator, and philologist. Although the order of these descriptors can vary, what they all have in common is the careful attention to the “word as an event” (after Bakhtin) in their attempt to uncover the ontological foundations of language. This complex issue was the focus of Bibikhin’s thought in general.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he established himself as a prominent translator of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. Bibikhin’s article we have chosen to present for the first time in English here, “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” was written in 1973, but to understand its significance one must go further back in time, to the 1920s and ‘30s.

On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation

By Vladimir Bibikhin . Translated from Russian by Margarita Marinova

To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given material according to the universal language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation.

The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints. It reveals the fundamental, even if only potential opportunity of the original to exist in any form.  Translatability shows that while the original may have been written in Japanese or Abkhazian, it was also first written in the universal human language. But, having liberated the original from its individual form, the translator now must breathe into it a new life in his native speech, recognizing and affirming in the process the universality of his own native tongue.

Against Camouflage: Jozefina Komporaly on Translating from Hungarian Melinda Mátyus’ “MyLifeandMyLife”

By Jozefina Komporaly

Melinda Mátyus’ novel in verse MyLifeandMyLife  is one of the most original pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations.

This is the first translation of Mátyus’ work in a foreign language and it comes in a bilingual edition, with the original Hungarian following Jozefina Komporaly’s English translation. We are grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for allowing us to publish here Komporaly’s translator’s note in which she discusses Mátyus’ unique sense of grammar and syntax, and her own approach to translating it.

The Afterlives of Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Road to the City”

By Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

Natalia Ginzburg wrote The Road to the City (La strada che va in città) in the fall of 1941, during a time of persecution, hardship, and deprivation. The previous year her husband Leone Ginzburg, a prominent intellectual and anti-fascist activist, had been confined to internal exile in the remote village of Pizzoli in the Abruzzo region. Natalia and their children had left their home in Turin and joined him in October 1940, forging a family and professional life in exile, despite the difficult conditions of their everyday reality.

The Road to the City  came out in 1942, under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte,” which Ginzburg used to evade Mussolini’s antiracial law restricting Jews from publishing. This novella was her first longer work, and it already contained the salient features of her poetics: stylistic economy and understatement, simplicity of diction, psychology constructed through details and actions, and a topographic imagination with the road and the city as its organizing figures.

Toward a Speculative Poetics of Translation: Janine Beichman’s Translation from Japanese of Ishigaki Rin’s “This Overflowing Light”

By James Garza

Over a career spanning decades, Ishigaki Rin (1920-2004) forged a poetry of keen moral discernment and wry self-discovery. On the one hand, her work was democratic in its language and outlook, premised on the possibility of liberation from the strictures of poverty and repressive social institutions. But it was also grounded in the absurdities of the everyday and the domestic, with a propensity for sharp turns into darkness. While this picture is not wrong, Janine Beichman argues in This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems (Isobar Press, 2022), it needs an update to recover several vital aspects of her poetics. In the volume’s artful and engaging introduction, Beichman calls our attention to several correspondences with contemporary poetics: first, there is the speculative orientation of Ishigaki’s work, capable of uncanny leaps in spatial and temporal perspective. Then there is its under-explored connection to eco-critical thought. And finally there is its playful but intense awareness of the agentive role of fantasy and imagination in constructing ‘real life.’  

Always Against: On Translating the Punk Rock Lyrics of Egor Letov

By Katie Frevert

During the second half of the 1980s, the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ushered in a renaissance period for the Soviet Union’s nascent rock scene. Bands that had gotten their start in underground apartment concerts could court mainstream success at rock clubs in the western Russian centers of Leningrad, Moscow, and Sverdlovsk under the watchful eye of state security. If the music of the degenerate West could not be eradicated, they reasoned, the KGB could curtail its harmful influence by supervising concerts, ensuring that politically dubious or stylistically unorthodox groups remained in the margins.

Yet in the western Siberian cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Tiumen’, where no such officially sanctioned venues existed, young rockers captivated by Western punk bypassed the censors by remaining underground and creating music openly critical of the Soviet system. The most well-known figure in this emerging punk counterculture was Igor Fёdorovich (“Egor”) Letov (1964-2008), who in 1984 founded the band Grazhdanskaia oborona (Civil Defense)

Julia Kornberg’s “Atomizado Berlín”: Creating a New Reader Across Translation

By Nora Méndez

In this essay, I investigate how Julia Kornberg writes a novel that challenges and subverts this ‘lazy’ reader with stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations, and think about how a translation of her text, though difficult or precisely because of that, has the ability to support and communicate across another language her careful mediation of the demands of the global literary market. In what follows I pay specific attention to how Kornberg utilizes the novel’s topic-choice, ambiguity of context, and inclusion of words in English, French, and other languages, to challenge the reader that the global literary market caters to reclaim their agency and individuality as able and active readers.

Stumbling Through the “Foreign”: A Look at Poupeh Missaghi’s Poetics of Translation

By Anna Learn

Poupeh Missaghi wants you , the reader, to stumble. 

In her genre-twisting 2020 novel trans(re)lating house one , the writer and translator declares, “I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place” (35). Although trans(re)lating house one is presented to us in English, Missaghi insists that Persian is the true language of its characters and city. The book was ‘translated’ from Persian to English, then, before it was ever written. For this reason, throughout her novel, Missaghi seeks to “acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the language to you, make them visible, and celebrate them” (35).

Er asing the Dividing Line: On Christian Bancroft’s “Queering Modernist Translation”

By Conor Bracken

“Translation is having a queer moment,” Christian Bancroft writes in the introduction to his monograph, Queering Modernist Translation (Routledge, 2020). The moment has been a long time coming: both fields, translation and queer studies, were thriving by the turn of the 21 st century, but only over the past ten years have special issues and edited essay collections begun to emerge with some frequency to consider their intersection, and the resulting “expansive ways of imagining the relationships among languages as they relate to the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them” (1). The uninitiated may wonder, what can queer theory offer translation, as a study and practice, aside from ways of uncovering or confronting the gender biases and heteronormativity in and between languages? Much more than that, I can enthusiastically report.

Reading Elena Ferrante in Bulgaria(n)

By Stiliana Milkova

Last year I read Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Lying Life of Adults ( La vita bugiarda degli adulti ) in Bulgarian, in Ivo Yonkov’s translation. It was September 2020, it had just been released by Ferrante’s Bulgarian publisher, Colibri , and I was in Bulgaria myself. I went to Helikon, the largest bookshop in my home town Burgas, and asked for Ferrante’s new novel. The saleswoman quickly showed it to me on the shelf and recommended, since I was interested in Ferrante, that I also buy Nora Roberts’s (or was it Danielle Steel’s?) latest novel. I didn’t argue with her – I just picked up The Lying Life of Adults , paid for it and left. I refrained from telling her that Ferrante’s book was not a romance novel and the bookstore should reconsider its classification. I didn’t tell her that I was a Ferrante expert, that my book Elena Ferrante as World Literature was coming out in a few months, that it was the first scholarly monograph on Ferrante written in English, and by a Bulgarian at that.

Always to Seek: On Reading Russian Literature in Translation

By Brandy Harrison

It all began with youthful audacity. When someone asked me one day, “What are you reading? , ” the answer was War and Peace. There was a pause, a faint flicker of confusion in the face hovering above my own, and then a slower, more tentative second question: “Why . . . are you reading that? ”

I, at seventeen, sitting propped up against my locker in the hallway, didn’t really have an answer. The plain grey hardcover teetering against my knees looked as thick and heavy as a brick (he said), and why would anyone want to read some novel about the . . . Russians . . . during the – what was it, again? The Napoleonic Wars? What was the point?

I shrugged with adolescent nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”

Neither Here and There: The Misery and Splendor of (Reverse) Translation*

by  Ekaterina Petrova

Translation is a gnarly business. Even more so when you’re doing it the wrong way around.

In Bulgarian, which I translate from, translating into a language that’s not your native tongue is colloquially known as  obraten prevod , which literally means “reverse translation.” As an adjective,  obraten  carries the negative connotation of something abnormal or backward, something that goes against the grain, or something that simply isn’t right. 

A Materialist Approach to Translation

By Sophie Drukman-Feldstein

The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the product of their labor. It is in fact the narrative of authorship which is unusual, in that literature is one of the few commodities which, rather than being conceptually distanced from the workers who produce it, is viewed as an extension of that worker’s self. By arguing that translation is art, translation theory abandons the possibility of fighting alienation writ large, and instead pursues for translators the unusual forms of acknowledgement which writers receive.

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Translation Studies, 3rd Ed - Bassnett, Susan (Routledge)

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Teaching Translation: Challenges, Ideas, Solutions

Translation is an essential and indispensable skill for foreign language students. Through translation, they have the opportunity not only to reflect upon and deeply understand cultural and linguistic aspects of the target language, but they are also capable of compare it with the source culture and language. It is a linguistic exercise, a creative process, as well as an opportunity for cultural immersion and a creative process. However, teaching a translation class or simply integrating translation activities into the language classroom comes with myriad pedagogical challenges for the instructor. Various translation techniques, different levels of language proficiency among students, and the selection of a variety of literary and non-literary texts are only some of the challenges this type of endeavor presents.

This roundtable for the upcoming PAMLA conference invites presentations that address these and other pedagogical questions, propose effective teaching tools and assessment ideas, and discuss possible creative solutions to issues regarding translation in the L2 classroom. Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief bio through the PAMLA portal  https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/ by June 16, 2024.