front cover of Africa in Translation
Africa in Translation
A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814-1945
Sara Pugach
University of Michigan Press, 2022

The study of African languages in Germany, or Afrikanistik, originated among Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century and was incorporated into German universities after Germany entered the “Scramble for Africa” and became a colonial power in the 1880s. Despite its long history, few know about the German literature on African languages or the prominence of Germans in the discipline of African philology. In Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945, Sara Pugach works to fill this gap, arguing that Afrikanistik was essential to the construction of racialist knowledge in Germany. While in other countries biological explanations of African difference were central to African studies, the German approach was essentially linguistic, linking language to culture and national identity. Pugach traces this linguistic focus back to the missionaries’ belief that conversion could not occur unless the “Word” was allowed to touch a person’s heart in his or her native language, as well as to the connection between German missionaries living in Africa and armchair linguists in places like Berlin and Hamburg. Over the years, this resulted in Afrikanistik scholars using language and culture rather than biology to categorize African ethnic and racial groups. Africa in Translation follows the history of Afrikanistik from its roots in the missionaries’ practical linguistic concerns to its development as an academic subject in both Germany and South Africa throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jacket image: Perthes, Justus. Mittel und Süd-Afrika. Map. Courtesy of the University of Michigan's Stephen S. Clark Library map collection.

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At Translation's Edge
Edited by Nataša Durovicová, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Since the 1970s, the field of Translation Studies has entered into dialogue with an array of other disciplines, sustaining a close but contentious relationship with literary translation. At Translation’s Edge expands this interdisciplinary dialogue by taking up questions of translation across sub-fields and within disciplines, including film and media studies, comparative literature, history, and education among others. For the contributors to this volume, translation is understood in its most expansive, transdisciplinary sense: translation as exchange, migration, and mobility, including cross-cultural communication and media circulation. Whether exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or silent film intertitles, this volume brings together the work of scholars aiming to address the edges of Translation Studies while engaging with major and minor languages, colonial and post-colonial studies, feminism and disability studies, and theories of globalization and empire.
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Authentic Materials Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Eve Zyzik and Charlene Polio
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The use of authentic materials in language classrooms is sometimes discussed as a reliable way to expose students to the target language, but there is also disagreement regarding what kinds of authentic materials should be used, when they should be used, and how much of the curriculum should revolve around them. This volume in the Myths series explores the research related to the use of authentic materials and the ways that  authentic materials may be used successfully in the classroom. Like others in the Myths series, this book combines research with good pedagogical practices.
 
The myths examined in this book are:
  • Authentic texts are inaccessible to beginners.
  • Authentic texts cannot be used to teach grammar.
  • Shorter texts are more beneficial for language learners.
  • Activating background knowledge or making a word list is sufficient to prepare students for authentic texts.
  • Authentic texts can be used to teach only listening and reading.
  • Modifying or simplifying authentic texts always helps language learners.
  • For learners to benefit from using authentic texts, the associated tasks must also be authentic.
The Epilogue explores the challenges of using authentic texts in the classroom and calls for more research. 
 
 

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Babel
Adventures in Translation
Dennis Duncan, Stephen Harrison, Katrin Kohl, and Matthew Reynolds
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019
This innovative collection of essays shows how linguistic diversity has inspired people across time and cultures to embark on adventurous journeys through the translation of texts. It tells the story of how ideas have travelled via the medium of translation into different languages and cultures, focusing on illustrated examples ranging from Greek papyri through illuminated manuscripts and fine early books to fantasy languages and the search for a universal language.

Starting with the concept of Babel itself, which illustrates the early cultural prominence of multilingualism, the book examines a Mediterranean language of four millennia ago called Linear A, which still resists deciphering today. Going on to explore how languages have interacted with each other in different contexts, the book also sheds light on the multilingual transmission of key texts in religion, science, fables and fairy-tales, and epic literature. Lavishly illustrated with a diverse range of material, from papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt to Esperanto handbooks to Asterix cartoons, Babel opens up a world of adventures into translation.
 
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Beyond Equivalence
Reconceptualizing Interpreting Performance Assessment
Elizabeth A. Winston
Gallaudet University Press, 2023

There is a longstanding need for valid, reliable measurements of interpreting competence. Although rubrics and checklists are commonly used in both academic and employment settings, a review of available rubrics indicates that many do not focus on interpreting performance. Traditional metrics for sign language interpreting often conflate language proficiency with interpreting proficiency. Conflating fundamental aspects of language in use—vocabulary, grammar, and prosody— with fundamental aspects of interpretation—content, intent, and monitoring—compromises the valid assessment of interpreting proficiency. Beyond Equivalence: Reconceptualizing Interpreting Performance Assessment argues for a shift toward more nuanced and evidence-based conceptualizations of interpreting, communication, and meaning to improve the creation and use of rubrics for assessment in interpreter education, certification, and professional development.

       This inaugural volume in the Currents series introduces a rubric and accompanying scale, which can be used to assess both simultaneous and consecutive interpreting performance in terms of both process and product, in both signed and spoken language interpreting, and in a variety of settings. Beyond Equivalence offers an appreciation of the multivarious nature of meaning in the interpreting process and presents a new paradigm for the measurement of interpreting proficiency.

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Beyond Translation
Essays toward a Modern Philology
A. L. Becker
University of Michigan Press, 2000
"This is not only a new philology but a new American linguistic philology. . . . Becker's harvest over a lifetime will be widely welcomed and respected." -Paul Friedrich, University of Chicago
". . . a book of extraordinary quality and importance." -James Boyd White, University of Michigan
How does Ralph Waldo Emerson sound in Kawi?
In this collection of essays A. L. Becker develops a new approach to translation he calls modern philology, an approach that insists, beyond translation, on the sorting out of ambiguities and contexts of meaning. Becker describes how texts in Burmese, Javanese, and Malay differ profoundly from English in all the ways they have meaning: in the games they play, the worlds they constitute, the memories they evoke, and the silences they maintain. In each of these dimensions there are excesses and inadequacies of meaning that make a difference across languages.
Drawn from over three decades of studying, teaching, translating and writing about Southeast Asian languages and literatures, the essays collected here for the first time are particular accounts of Becker's experiences in attempting to translate into or out of Burmese, Javanese, and Malay a variety of texts. They describe such things as the building of a Javanese shadowplay, how a Sanskrit story about the language of animals has been used in Indonesia, and some of the profound semantic silences a translator faces in taking an anecdote by Gregory Bateson from English into Malay.
In linguistics, the essays emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism. In anthropology, the essays demonstrate that much of culture can be described in terms of text-building strategies. And for the comparativist, whether in literature, history, rhetoric, music, or psychology, the essays provide a new array of tools of comparison across distant languages and cultures.
A. L. Becker is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology, University of Michigan.
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Cannibal Translation
Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America
Isabel C. Gómez
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Winner of the 2024 ACLA Harry Levin Prize 

A bold comparative study illustrating the creative potential of translations that embrace mutuality and resist assimilation


Cannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel C. Gómez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century, such as Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and Ángel Rama. Building on the avant-garde reclaiming of cannibalism as an Indigenous practice meant to honorably incorporate the other into the self, these authors took up Brazilian theories of translation in Spanish to fashion a distinctly Latin American literary exchange, one that rejected normative and Anglocentric approaches to translation and developed collaborative techniques to bring about a new understanding of world literature. 

By shedding new light on the political and aesthetic pathways of translation movements beyond the Global North, Gómez offers an alternative conception of the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by this artistic practice. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America mobilizes a capacious archive of personal letters, publishers’ records, newspapers, and new media to illuminate inventive strategies of collectivity and process, such as untranslation, transcreation, intersectional autobiographical translation, and transpeaking. The book invites readers to find fresh meaning in other translational histories and question the practices that mediate literary circulation.
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A Companion to Medieval Translation
Jeanette Beer
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
<div>Translation played an essential role throughout the Middle Ages, bridging the gap between literate and lay, and enabling intercourse between languages in multi-lingual Europe. Medieval translation was extremely diverse, ranging from the literality and Latinity of legal documents to the free adaptation of courtly romance. </div><div>This guide to medieval translation covers a broad range of religious and vernacular texts and addresses the theoretical and pragmatic problems faced by modern translators of medieval works as they attempt to mediate between past and present.</div>
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Conversations with Interpreter Educators
Exploring Best Practices
Christine Monikowski
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
Sign language interpreter education is a relatively young field that is moving toward more theory-based and research-oriented approaches. The concept of sharing research, which is strongly encouraged in this academic community, inspired Christine Monikowski to develop a volume that collects and distills the best teaching practices of leading academics in the interpreting field.
       In Conversations with Interpreter Educators, Monikowski assembles a group of 17 professors in the field of sign language interpretation. Through individual interviews conducted via Skype, Monikowski engages them in informal conversations about their teaching experiences and the professional publications that have influenced their teaching philosophies. She guides each conversation by asking these experts to share a scholarly publication that they assign to their students. They discuss the merits of the text and its role in the classroom, which serves to highlight the varying goals each professor sets for students. The complexity of the interpreting task, self-reflection, critical thinking, linguistics, backchannel feedback, and cultural understanding are a sampling of topics explored in these exchanges. Engaging and accessible, Monikowski’s conversations offer evidence-based practices that will inform and inspire her fellow educators.
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The Craft of Translation
Edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Written by some of the most distinguished literary translators working in English today, these essays offer new and uncommon insights into the understanding and craft of translation. The contributors not only describe the complexity of translating literature but also suggest the implications of the act of translation for critics, scholars, teachers, and students. The demands of translation, according to these writers, require both comprehensive scholarship in preparing to translate a text and broad creativity in recreating the text in a new language. Translation, thus, becomes a model for the most exacting reading and the most serious scholarship.

Some of the contributors lay bare the rigorous methods of literary translation in comparisons of various translations of the same piece; some discuss the problems of translating a specific passage; others speak about the lessons learned over the course of a career in translation. As these essays make clear, translators work in the space between languages and, in so doing, provide insights into the ways in which a culture makes the world verbal. Exemplary readers both of authors and of their individual works, the translators represented in this collection demonstrate that the methodologies derived from the art and craft of translation can serve as a model to revitalize the interpretation and understanding of literary works.

Readers will find the opportunity to look over the shoulders of the translators gathered together in this volume an exciting and surprising experience. The act of translation emerges both as a powerful integration of linguistic, semantic, cultural, and historical thinking and as a valuable commentary on how we communicate both within a culture and from one culture to another.
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Deaf Eyes on Interpreting
Thomas K. Holcomb
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
As the ASL-English interpreting field has become professionalized, there is a growing disconnect between interpreters and the Deaf consumers they serve. Whereas interpreting used to be a community-based practice, the field is growing into a research-based profession that begins in a classroom rather than in the Deaf community. Despite the many gains being made in the interpreting services profession, with an emphasis on the accuracy of the interpreted work, the perspectives of Deaf individuals are rarely documented in the literature. Opportunities for enhanced participation and full inclusion need to be considered in order for Deaf people to best represent themselves to the hearing, nonsigning public as competent and intelligent individuals.

       Deaf Eyes on Interpreting brings Deaf people to the forefront of the discussions about what constitutes quality interpreting services. The contributors are all Deaf professionals who use interpreters on a regular basis, and their insights and recommendations are based on research as well as on personal experiences. These multiple perspectives reveal strategies to maximize access to interpreted work and hearing environments and to facilitate trust and understanding between interpreters and Deaf consumers. Interpreter educators, interpreting students, professional interpreters, and Deaf individuals will all benefit from the approaches offered in this collection.
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Empire of Texts in Motion
Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature
Karen Laura Thornber
Harvard University Press, 2009

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.

Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

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Evolving Paradigms in Interpreter Education
Elizabeth A. Winston
Gallaudet University Press, 2013

This volume brings together a cadre of world-renowned interpreting educators and researchers who conduct a rich exploration of paradigms, both old and new, in interpreter education. They review existing research, explicate past and current practices, and call for a fresh look at the roots of interpreter education in anticipation of the future. Expert commentary accompanies each chapter to provide a starting point for reflection on and discussion of the growing needs in this discipline.

       Volume coeditor Christine Monikowski begins by considering how interpreter educators can balance their responsibilities of teaching, practice, and research. Her chapter is accompanied by commentary about the capacity to “academize” what has been thought of as a semi-profession. Helen Tebble shares research on medical interpreting from an applied linguistic perspective. Terry Janzen follows with the impact of linguistic theory on interpretation research methodology. Barbara Shaffer discusses how interpreting theory shapes the interpreter’s role. Elizabeth A. Winston, also a volume coeditor, rounds out this innovative collection with her chapter on infusing evidence-based teaching practices into interpreting education. Noted interpreter educators and researchers also provide an international range of insights in this collection, including Rico Peterson, Beppie van den Bogaerde, Karen Bontempo, Ian Mason, Ester Leung, David Quinto-Pozos, Lorraine Leeson, Jemina Napier, Christopher Stone, Debra Russell, and Claudia Angelelli.

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Faithful Renderings
Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
Naomi Seidman
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Faithful Renderings reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference and, conversely, views Jewish–Christian difference as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, Seidman asks how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West. 

Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, Naomi Seidman considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel’s Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. Faithful Renderings ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians and indeed the development of each religious community.
 
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Faithful Translators
Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England
Jaime Goodrich
Northwestern University Press, 2014
With Faithful Translators Jaime Goodrich offers the first in-depth examination of women’s devotional translations and of religious translations in general within early modern England. Placing female translators such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, alongside their male counterparts, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, Goodrich argues that both male and female translators constructed authorial poses that allowed their works to serve four distinct cultural functions: creating privacy, spreading propaganda, providing counsel, and representing religious groups. Ultimately, Faithful Translators calls for a reconsideration of the apparent simplicity of "faithful" translations and aims to reconfigure perceptions of early modern authorship, translation, and women writers.
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Fixers
Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature
Zrinka Stahuljak
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A new history of early global literature that treats translators as active agents mediating cultures.
 

In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both medieval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the medieval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles medieval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.
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The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation
Mustafa Mughazy
Georgetown University Press

"Translation is like a reverse-engineering process—whereby, say, we might take apart a clock made of metal parts in order to build a functioning replica made entirely of plastic. Our final product will not look the same as the original clock, and it would be impossible to simply copy the designs of its inner workings, because plastic and metals have very different properties. For example, we cannot make small plastic springs or very thin gears of plastic. But these changes do not matter; the only thing that matters is that our replica will tell the time correctly.”—From the Introduction

The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation is an essential step-by-step, practical manual for advanced learners of Arabic interested in how to analyze and accurately translate nonfiction Arabic texts ranging from business correspondence to textbooks.

Mustafa Mughazy, a respected Arabic linguist, presents an innovative, functional approach that de-emphasizes word-for-word translation. Based on the Optimality Theory, it favors remaining faithful to the communicative function of the source material, even if this means adding explanatory text, reconfiguring sentences, paraphrasing expressions, or omitting words.

From how to select a text for translation or maintain tense or idiom, to how to establish translation patterns, The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation is useful both as a textbook and a reference. An invaluable set of appendices offers shortcuts to translate particularly difficult language like abbreviations, collocations, and common expressions in business correspondence, while authentic annotated texts provide the reader opportunities to practice the strategies presented in the book. A must-read for advanced learners of Arabic, this is a book every scholar and graduate-level student will wish to own.

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Hermes I
Communication
Michel Serres
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works

 

Michel Serres is recognized as one of the giants of postwar French philosophy of knowledge, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilbert Simondon. His early five-volume series Hermes, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, was an intellectual supernova in its proposition that culture and science shared the same mythic and narrative structures. Hermes I: Communication marks the start of a major publishing endeavor to introduce this foundational series into English. 

 

Building on the figure of the Greek god Hermes, who presides over the realms of communication and interpretation, Hermes I embarks on a reflection concerning the history of mathematics via Descartes and Leibniz and culminates by way of a Bachelardian logoanalytic reading of Homer, Dumas, Molière, Verne, and the story of Cinderella. We observe a singular poetic philosopher seeking to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the sciences through a profound mathematical and poetic fable regarding information theory, history, and art, establishing a new way to think about the production of knowledge during the late twentieth century. In these pages, students and scholars of philosophy will discover an extraordinary project of thought as vital to critical reflection today as it was fifty years ago.

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Interpreting in the Zone
How the Conscious and Unconscious Function in Interpretation
Jack Hoza
Gallaudet University Press, 2016
Successful interpretation can feel seamless, an intuitive and efficient translation of meaning from one signed or spoken language to another. Yet the process of interpretation is actually quite complex and relies upon myriad components ranging from preparation to experience to honed judgment. Interpreting in the zone, instinctively and confidently, is an energizing, encompassing experience that results in great satisfaction and top performance—but what does it take to get there?

       Jack Hoza’s newest research examines the components that enable interpreters to perform successfully, looking at literature in interpretation, cognitive science, education, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as reviewing the results of two qualitative studies he conducted. He seeks to uncover what it means to interpret in the zone by understanding exactly how the brain works in interpretation scenarios. He explores a range of dichotomies that influence interpretation outcomes, such as:
  • Intuition vs. rational thought
  • Left brain vs. right brain
  • Explicit vs. implicit learning
  • Novice vs. master
  • Spoken vs. signed languages
  • Emotion vs. reasoning
       Cognitive processes such as perception, short-term memory, and reflexivity are strong factors in driving successful interpretation and are explored along with habits, behaviors, and learned strategies that can help or hinder interpretation skills. Hoza also considers the importance of professional development and collaboration with other practitioners in order to continually hone expertise.

       Interpreting in the Zone shows that cognitive research can help us better understand the intricacies of the interpreting process and has implications for how to approach the interpreting task. This resource will be of value to both the interpreter-in-training as well as the seasoned practitioner.
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Introducción a la Traductología
Gerardo Vázquez-Ayora
Georgetown University Press, 1977

Introduccion a la Traductologia integrates the theoretical and practical aspects of translation.

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The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny
Proceedings of the First James Loeb Biennial Conference, Munich and Murnau 18–20 May 2017
Jeffrey Henderson and Richard F. Thomas
Harvard University Press, 2020

James Loeb (1867–1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), psychology and medicine (2021), and music (2023).

The subject of the inaugural conference was the legacy for which Loeb is best known and the only one to which he attached his name—the Loeb Classical Library, and the three series it has inspired: the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, and the Murty Classical Library of India. Including discussions by the four General Editors of each Library’s unique history, mission, operations, and challenges, the papers collected in The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny also take stock of these series in light of more general themes and questions bearing on translations of “classical” texts and their audiences in a variety of societies past, present, and future.

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Made Under Pressure
Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960-1991
Natalia Kamovnikova
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with literary translators, Made Under Pressure offers an insider's look at Soviet censorship and the role translators played in promoting foreign authors—including figures like John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner.

Natalia Kamovnikova chronicles the literary translation process from the selection of foreign literary works to their translation, censorship, final approval, and publication. Interviews with Soviet translators of this era provide insight into how the creative work of translating and the practical work of publishing were undertaken within a politically restricted environment, and recall the bonds of community and collaboration that they developed.
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Mirror on Mirror
Translation, Imitation, Parody
Reuben Arthur Brower
Harvard University Press, 1974

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Motherless Tongues
The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation
Vicente L. Rafael
Duke University Press, 2016
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history gleaned from the workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond. Moving across a range of colonial and postcolonial settings, he demonstrates translation's agency in the making and understanding of events. These include nationalist efforts to vernacularize politics, U.S. projects to weaponize languages in wartime, and autobiographical attempts by area studies scholars to translate the otherness of their lives amid the Cold War. In all cases, translation is at war with itself, generating divergent effects. It deploys as well as distorts American English in counterinsurgency and colonial education, for example, just as it re-articulates European notions of sovereignty among Filipino revolutionaries in the nineteenth century and spurs the circulation of text messages in a civilian-driven coup in the twenty-first. Along the way, Rafael delineates the untranslatable that inheres in every act of translation, asking about the politics and ethics of uneven linguistic and semiotic exchanges. Mapping those moments where translation and historical imagination give rise to one another, Motherless Tongues shows how translation, in unleashing the insurgency of language, simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power. 
 
 
 
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Plum Wine
A Novel
Angela Davis-Gardner
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath.
     As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war. Plum Wine examines human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war in a story that is both original and timeless.

2007 A Notable Fiction Book of 2007, selected by the Kiriyama Prize Committee
 
Winner, Fiction Award, Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance
 
Notable Fiction, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
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The Promise of the Foreign
Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines
Vicente L. Rafael
Duke University Press, 2005
In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy.

Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.

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The Rhetorical Mediator
Understanding Agency in Indigenous Translation and Interpretation through Indigenous Approaches to UX
Nora K. Rivera
Utah State University Press, 2023
The Rhetorical Mediator reveals how and why scholars and user experience (UX) researchers can include Indigenous technical communicators and oral interpretation practices in their interdisciplinary conversations. Nora Rivera analyzes the challenges that Indigenous interpreters and translators face in Peru, Mexico, and the United States as a means of understanding their agency and examines the various ways in which technical and professional communication, translation and interpreting studies, and UX research can better support the practices of Indigenous interpreters and translators.
 
In places where Indigenous language translation and interpretation are greatly needed, Indigenous language mediators often lack adequate systems to professionalize their field while withstanding Western practices that do not align with their worldviews. Through a “design thinking” methodology based on her work organizing and participating in an Indigenous-focused interpreter and translator conference, Rivera examines testimonios and semi-structured interviews conducted with Indigenous interpreters and translators to emphasize dialogue and desahogo (emotional release) as Indigenous communication practices.
 
The Rhetorical Mediator advocates for Indigenous language practices that have been sidelined by Western scholarship and systems, helping to create more equitable processes to directly benefit Indigenous individuals and other underrepresented groups. This book benefits specialists, including UX researchers, technical and professional communicators, interpreters and translators, and Indigenous professionals, as well as academics teaching graduate and undergraduate methods, Indigenous rhetoric and translation, and UX courses.
 
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Setting Plato Straight
Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance
Todd W. Reeser
University of Chicago Press, 2015
When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholars—most of them Catholic—read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem: how to be faithful to the text yet not propagate pederasty or homosexuality.

In Setting Plato Straight, Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Plato’s texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correction—of setting Plato straight.
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Shakespeare and the French Poet
Yves Bonnefoy
University of Chicago Press, 2004
A meditation on the major plays of Shakespeare and the thorny art of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet contains twelve essays from France's most esteemed critic and preeminent living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Offering observations on Shakespeare's response to the spiritual crisis of his era as well as compelling insights on the practical and theoretical challenges of verse in translation, Bonnefoy delivers thoughtful, evocative essays penned in his characteristically powerful prose.

Translated specifically for an American readership, Shakespeare and the French Poet also features a new interview with Bonnefoy. For Shakespeare scholars, Bonnefoy enthusiasts, and students of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet is a celebration of the global language of poetry and the art of "making someone else's voice live again in one's own."
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Sign Language Interpreting
Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality
Melanie Metzger
Gallaudet University Press, 1998
As with all professional interpreters, sign language interpreters strive to achieve the proper protocol of complete objectivity and accuracy in their translation without influencing the interaction in any way. Yet, Melanie Metzger's significant work Sign Language Interpreting: Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality demonstrates clearly that the ideal of an interpreter as a neutral language conduit does not exist. Metzger offers evidence of this disparity by analyzing two videotaped ASL-English interpreted medical interviews, one an interpreter-trainee mock interview session, and the other an actual encounter between a deaf client and a medical professional.

          Sign Language Interpreting relies upon an interactional sociolinguistic approach to ask fundamental questions regarding interpreter neutrality. First, do interpreters influence discourse, and if so, how? Also, what kind of expectations do the participants bring to the event, and what do the interpreters bring to discussions? Finally, how do their remarks affect their alignment with participants in the interaction? Using careful assessments of how these interviews were framed, and also re-interviewing the participants for their perspectives, this penetrating book discloses the ways in which interpreters influence these situations. It also addresses the potential implications of these findings regarding sign language interpretation in medical, educational, and all other general interactions. Interpreter trainers and their students will join certified interpreters and Deaf studies scholars in applauding and benefiting from the fresh ground broken by this provocative study.
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Signed Language Interpreting Pedagogy
Insights and Innovations from the Conference of Interpreter Trainers
Laurie Swabey
Gallaudet University Press, 2022
For over forty years, the Conference of Interpreter Trainers has provided opportunities for advancing teaching and learning in interpreter education. This volume highlights fifteen seminal papers from past conference proceedings, along with newly written responses to the selected papers. Many of the new contributions are co-written by the author of the original paper and one or more emerging scholars, giving readers a historical lens on how the field of signed language interpreting pedagogy has evolved. The volume also calls attention to issues with which the field must urgently contend, such as implementing a Deaf-centric approach, multicultural interpreting curricula, the recruitment and retention of African American/Black students, and social justice.

       The contributors explore other important topics in interpreter education including ethics, Deaf translation, performance evaluation, consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, discourse analysis, critical thinking, curriculum sequencing, the social construction of learning, and mentoring. Through this collaborative approach featuring more than thirty scholars, Signed Language Interpreting Pedagogy presents a wealth of theoretical and practical information for interpreter educators and their students.
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Sites of Translation
What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric
Laura Gonzales
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize

Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication. Sites of Translation is relevant to researchers and teachers of writing as well as technology designers interested in creating systems, pedagogies, and platforms that will be more accessible and useful to multilingual audiences. Gonzales presents multilingual communication as intellectual labor that should be further valued in both academic and professional spaces, and supported by multilingual technologies and pedagogies that center the expertise of linguistically diverse communicators.
 

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Strange Cocktail
Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry
Adriana X. Jacobs
University of Michigan Press, 2018

For centuries, poets have turned to translation for creative inspiration. Through and in translation, poets have introduced new poetic styles, languages, and forms into their own writing, sometimes changing the course of literary history in the process. Strange Cocktail is the first comprehensive study of this phenomenon in modern Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth century to the present day. Its chapters on Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel offer close readings that examine the distinct poetics of translation that emerge from reciprocal practices of writing and translating. Working in a minor literary vernacular, the translation strategies that these poets employed allowed them to create and participate in transnational and multilingual poetic networks. Strange Cocktail thereby advances a comparative and multilingual reframing of modern Hebrew literature that considers how canons change and are undone when translation occupies a central position—how lines of influence and affiliation are redrawn and literary historiographies are revised when the work of translation occupies the same status as an original text, when translating and writing go hand in hand.

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Theories of Translation
An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida
Edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Spanning the centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth, and ranging across cultures, from England to Mexico, this collection gathers together important statements on the function and feasibility of literary translation. The essays provide an overview of the historical evolution in thinking about translation and offer strong individual opinions by prominent contemporary theorists.

Most of the twenty-one pieces appear in translation, some here in English for the first time and many difficult to find elsewhere. Selections include writings by Scheiermacher, Nietzsche, Ortega, Benjamin, Pound, Jakobson, Paz, Riffaterre, Derrida, and others.

A fine companion to The Craft of Translation, this volume will be a valuable resource for all those who translate, those who teach translation theory and practice, and those interested in questions of language philosophy and literary theory.
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Tokens of Exchange
The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations
Lydia H. Liu, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times.
By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization.
The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang

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Translating Childhoods
Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture
Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little is known about the younger generation, often considered "invisible." Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the "work" they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution.

Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be "in the middle" or the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

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Translating the Garden
By M. R. Ghanoonparvar
University of Texas Press, 2002

Translating a work of literature from one language to another is an art form, in which the translated work becomes a "conduit" through which the reader of one language may pass into the cultural world of another. For the translator, the process of translation offers an intimate experience of the text that is perhaps unavailable even to the author. And yet, as M. R. Ghanoonparvar observes at the outset of this book, "every translation is inevitably a failure, with occasional moments of success."

In Translating the Garden, Ghanoonparvar allows readers to watch him in the process of translating Shahrokh Meskub's Goftogu dar Bagh(Dialogue in the Garden) from Persian into English. This short philosophical work uses a conversation between a writer and a painter to explore Persian perceptions of art, literature, nature, identity, and spirituality. As he translates the text, Ghanoonparvar discusses the myriad decisions that a literary translator faces, from word choices to the problems of conveying cultural concepts and deciphering authorial intent. He also compares some of his translated passages with those of other translators to highlight the uniqueness of each act of translation. The complete English translation of Dialogue in the Garden rounds out the volume.

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Translating Worlds
The Epistemological Space of Translation
Edited by Carlo Severi and William F. Hanks
HAU, 2015
Set against the backdrop of anthropology’s recent focus on various “turns” (whether ontological, ethical, or otherwise), this pathbreaking volume returns to the question of knowledge and the role of translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology, gathering together contributions from leading thinkers in the field.

Since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation nearly impossible. And still others have viewed translation between languages as principally indeterminate. The contributors here argue that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation between incommensurable worlds and systems may be the most fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. Ranging from tourism in New Guinea to shamanism in the Amazon to the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, the contributors mix philosophy and ethnography to redefine translation not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography but as a larger principle in epistemology.  
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Translation
Martin Kay
CSLI, 2015
Martin Kay’s Translation is concerned with the fundamental underpinnings of the titular subject. Kay argues that the primary responsibility of the translator is to the referents of words themselves. He shows how a pair of sentences that might have widely different meanings in isolation could have similar meanings in some contexts. Exploring such key subjects as how to recognize when a pair of texts might be translations of each other, Kay attempts to answer the essential question: What is translation anyway?
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Translation and Epistemicide
Racialization of Languages in the Americas
Joshua M. Price
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Translation has facilitated colonialism from the fifteenth century to the present day. Epistemicide, which involves destroying, marginalizing, or banishing Indigenous, subaltern, and counter-hegemonic knowledges, is one result. In the Americas, it is a racializing process. But in the hands of subaltern translators and interpreters, translation has also been used as a decolonial method.

The book gives an account of translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas, drawing on a range of examples from the early colonial period to the War on Terror. The first chapters demonstrate four distinct operations of epistemicide: the commensuration of worlds, the epistemic marginalization of subaltern translators and the knowledge they produce, the criminalization of translators and interpreters, and translation as piracy or extractivism. The second part of the book outlines decolonial translation strategies, including an epistemic posture the author calls “bewilderment.”

Translation and Epistemicide tracks how through the centuries translation practices have enabled colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge.
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Translation and Power
Maria Tymoczko
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002
The contributors to this volume see translation as an activity that takes place not in an ideal neutral site but in real social and political situations, with parties who have vested interests in the production and reception of texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Translation is not simply a process of faithful reproduction but invariably involves deliberate acts of selection, construction, and omission. It is inextricably linked to issues of cultural dominance, assertion, and resistance—in short, to power.

Although governments, churches, publishing firms, and other powerful institutions may influence the translation process, many translators have found ways to resist that influence and have used translation to introduce new ideas and modes of expression. Exploring the nexus of translation and power, the essays in this volume offer a wide variety of examples, across multiple languages and societies. They range from case studies of historical episodes in which translation has played a role in the assertion of political and military power, such as an 1840 treaty between the British and Maori that continues to be a source of conflict in present-day New Zealand, to analyses of the work of specific translators, such as Germaine de Staël and Gayatri Spivak. Along with examining how translation contributes to ideological negotiations and cultural struggles, the essays reveal the dimensions of power inherent in the translation process itself—in the relationship of translator to author, source text, and translated text.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Rosemary Arrojo, Michael Cronin, Sabine Fenton, Camino Gutiérrez Lanza, Christopher Larkosh, Alexandra Lianeri, Lin Kenan, Carol Maier, Paul Moon, Adriana S. Pagano, and Sherry Simon.
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Translation, Resistance, Activism
Maria Tymoczko
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
More than merely linguistic transposition, translation is a vector of power, resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Exploring these facets of the ideology of translation, the contributors to this volume focus on the agency of translators and their activism. Spanning two centuries and reaching across the globe, the essays examine the varied activist strategies of key translators and translation movements.

From silence to radical manipulation of texts, translation strategies are instrumental in significant historical interventions and cultural change. Translation plays a pivotal role in ideological dialogue and struggle, including resistance to oppression and cultural straitjackets of all types, from sexual puritanism to military dictatorships. Situated in their own space, time, history, and political contexts, translators promote ideological agendas by creating new cultural narratives, pragmatically adjusting tactics so as to maximize the social and political impact.

The essays in this volume explore ways to read translations as records of cultural contestation and ideological struggle; as means of fighting censorship, physical coercion, cultural repression, and political dominance; and as texts that foster a wide variety of goals from cultural nationalism to armed confrontation. Translations are set in relief as central cultural documents rather than derivative, peripheral, or marginalized productions. They are seen as forms of ethical, political, and ideological activity rather than as mere communicative transactions or creative literary exercises.

The contributors demonstrate that engaged and activist translations are performative acts within broader political and ideological contexts. The essays detail the initiative, resourcefulness, and courage of individual translators, whose willingness to put themselves on the line for social change can sometimes move the world.

In addition to Maria Tymoczko, contributors include Pua'ala'okalani D. Aiu, Brian James Baer, Mona Baker, Paul F. Bandia, Georges L. Bastin, Nitsa Ben-Ari, Ángela Campo, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Álvaro Echeverri, Denise Merkle, John Milton, and Else R.P. Vieira.
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Translation, Sociolinguistic, and Consumer Issues in Interpreting
Melanie Metzger
Gallaudet University Press, 2007

The Third Volume in the Studies in Interpretation Series

This new volume focuses on scholarship over a refined spectrum of issues that confront interpreters internationally. Editors Melanie Metzger and Earl Fleetwood call upon researchers from the United States, Ireland, Australia, and the Philippines to share their findings in six chapters.

In the first chapter, Roberto R. Santiago and Lisa A. Frey Barrick reveal how interpreters deal with translating source language idioms into American Sign Language (ASL). In Chapter 2, Lorraine Neeson and Susan Foley-Cave review the particular demands for decision-making that face interpreters on several levels in a class on semantics and pragmatics. Liza B. Martinez explains in Chapter 3 the complicated, multilingual process of code switching by Filipino interpreters when voice-interpreting Filipino Sign Language.

Chapter 4 offers a deconstruction by Daniel Roush of the stereotype that Deaf ASL-users are direct or blunt, based on his analysis of two speech/social activities of requests and refusals. Jemina Napier investigates interpreting from the perspective of deaf consumers in Australia in Chapter 5 to explore their agenda for quality interpreting services. In the final chapter, Amy Frasu evaluates methods for incorporating visual aids into interpretations from spoken English to American Sign Language and the potential cognitive dissonance for deaf persons that could result.

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Translation’s Forgotten History
Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature
Heekyoung Cho
Harvard University Press, 2016
Translation’s Forgotten History investigates the meanings and functions that translation generated for modern national literatures during their formative period and reconsiders literature as part of a dynamic translational process of negotiating foreign values. By examining the triadic literary and cultural relations among Russia, Japan, and colonial Korea and revealing a shared sensibility and literary experience in East Asia (which referred to Russia as a significant other in the formation of its own modern literatures), this book highlights translation as a radical and ineradicable part—not merely a catalyst or complement—of the formation of modern national literature. Translation’s Forgotten History thus rethinks the way modern literature developed in Korea and East Asia. While national canons are founded on amnesia regarding their process of formation, framing literature from the beginning as a process rather than an entity allows a more complex and accurate understanding of national literature formation in East Asia and may also provide a model for world literature today.
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The Translations of Nebrija
Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World
Byron Ellsworth Hamann
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In 1495, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija published a Spanish-to-Latin dictionary that became a best seller. Over the next century it was revised dozens of times, in nine European cities. As these dictionaries made their way around the globe in this age of encounters, their lists of Spanish words became frameworks for dictionaries of non-Latin languages. What began as Spanish to Latin became Spanish to Arabic, French, English, Tuscan, Nahuatl, Mayan, Quechua, Aymara, Tagalog, and more.

Tracing the global influence of Nebrija's dictionary, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, in this interdisciplinary, deeply researched book, connects pagan Rome, Muslim Spain, Aztec Tenochtitlan, Elizabethan England, the Spanish Philippines, and beyond, revealing new connections in world history. The Translations of Nebrija re-creates the travels of people, books, and ideas throughout the early modern world and reveals the adaptability of Nebrija's text, tracing the ways heirs and pirate printers altered the dictionary in the decades after its first publication. It reveals how entries in various editions were expanded to accommodate new concepts, such as for indigenous languages in the Americas—a process with profound implications for understanding pre-Hispanic art, architecture, and writing. It shows how words written in the margins of surviving dictionaries from the Americas shed light on the writing and researching of dictionaries across the early modern world.

Exploring words and the dictionaries that made sense of them, this book charts new global connections and challenges many assumptions about the early modern world.
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The Translator in the Text
On Reading Russian Literature in English
Rachel May
Northwestern University Press, 1994
What does it mean to read one nation's literature in another language? The considerable popularity of Russian literature in the English-speaking world rests almost entirely upon translations. In The Translator and the Text, Rachel May analyzes Russian literature in English translation, seeing it less as a substitute for the original works than as a subset of English literature, with its own cultural, stylistic, and narrative traditions.
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A Translator’s Defense
Giannozzo Manetti
Harvard University Press, 2016
Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was an Italian diplomat and a celebrated humanist orator and scholar of the early Renaissance. Son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, he turned away from a commercial career to take up scholarship under the guidance of the great civic humanist, Leonardo Bruni. Like Bruni he mastered both classical Latin and Greek, but, unusually, added to his linguistic armory a command of Biblical Hebrew as well. He used his knowledge of Hebrew to make a fresh translation of the Psalms into humanist Latin, a work that implicitly challenged the canonical Vulgate of St. Jerome. His Apologeticus (1455–59) in five books was a defense of the study of Hebrew and of the need for a new translation. As such, it constituted the most extensive treatise on the art of translation of the Renaissance. This ITRL edition contains the first complete translation of the work into English.
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The Undiscovered Country
Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio
Melek Ortabasi
Harvard University Press, 2014

Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan’s cultural identity. A self-taught folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, he promoted folk studies in Japan. So extensive was his role that he has been compared with the fabled Grimm Brothers of Germany and the great British folklorist James G. Frazer (1854–1941), author of The Golden Bough. This monograph is only the second book-length English-language examination of Yanagita, and it is the first analysis that moves beyond a biographical account of his pioneering work in folk studies.

An eccentric but insightful critic of Japan’s rush to modernize, Yanagita offers a compelling array of rebuttals to mainstream social and political trends in his carefully crafted writings. Through a close reading of Yanagita’s interdisciplinary texts, which comment on a wide range of key cultural issues that characterized the first half of Japan’s twentieth century, Melek Ortabasi seeks to reevaluate the historical significance of his work. Ortabasi’s inquiry simultaneously exposes, discursively, some of the fundamental assumptions we embrace about modernity and national identity in Japan and elsewhere.

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Un/Translatables
New Maps for Germanic Literatures
Edited by Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod
Northwestern University Press, 2016
The term "Untranslatables" is rooted in two explorations of translation written originally in German: Walter Benjamin's now ubiquitous "The Task of the Translator" and Goethe's extensive notes to his "tradaptation" of mystical Persian poetry. The essays collected in Un/Translatables unite two inescapable interventions in contemporary translation discourses: the concept of "Untranslatables" as points of productive resistance, and the Germanic tradition as the primary dialogue partner for translation studies. The essays collected in the volume pursue the critical itineraries that would result if "Untranslatables," as discussed in Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables, were returned, productively estranged, to their original German context. Thus, these essays explore Untranslatables across Germanic literatures—German, Yiddish, Dutch, and Afrikaans—and follow trajectories into Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, English, and Scots.
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Virgin Crossing Borders
Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation
Emek Ergun
University of Illinois Press, 2023
The Turkish-language release of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History is a politically engaged translation aimed at disrupting Turkey’s heteropatriarchal virginity codes. In Virgin Crossing Borders, Emek Ergun maps how she crafted her rendering of the text and draws on her experience and the book’s impact to investigate the interventionist power of feminist translation.

Ergun’s comparative framework reveals translation’s potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational feminist solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation’s role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings.

Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation’s vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge.

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