Toward a Translation Criticism

Toward a Translation Criticism
Author: Antoine Berman
Publisher: Kent State University
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Françoise Massardier-Kenney's translation of Antoine Berman's Toward a Translation Criticism makes available for the first time in the English-speaking world one of the twentieth-century's foundational texts in translation studies. Berman's book, published posthumously in France, develops an original concept of "criticism of translation" and a methodology to anchor the practice of this criticism. He demonstrates how the work of translation is a critical process as well as a creative one. Moving away from nonsystematic evaluative approaches that focus on the shortcomings of translations or the normative approaches that study the cultural and literary systems into which the translations are inserted, Berman applies the notion of ethics he developed in his earlier works, calling for a translation that is nonethnocentric and stipulating that the creativity required by translation be focused on the re-creation of the original in the other language without being over-determined by the personal poetics of the writer-translator. Berman achieves a rare combination of hermeneutic and stylistic analysis, of commentary on the original and analysis of its translations, giving the reader access both "to the language of the original--to the way in which poetry and thought are deployed--and to the actual work of translation." Toward a Translation Criticism is divided into two separate but interlinked parts, each focused on one element of the ethics of translation: theory (reflection) and practice (experience). In the first part Berman presents what he calls a general "productive criticism," while in the second part he applies the general theoretical principles of this criticism to the analysis of the translations of John Donne's work into French and Spanish. The translation of Berman's text is accompanied by an introduction placing Berman's thought in its intellectual context and by supplementary notes that complete the bibliographic material presented in the French-language version. This study is essential reading for translation studies scholars, readers interested in the creative literary process, in the nature of literary criticism, andin the philosophy of language. It will also be of interest to John Donne specialists.

Toward the Critique of Violence

Toward the Critique of Violence
Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1503627683

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

The Age of Translation

The Age of Translation
Author: Antoine Berman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317502485

The Age of Translation is the first English translation of Antoine Berman’s commentary on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Chantal Wright’s translation includes an introduction which positions the text in relation to current developments in translation studies, and provides prefatory explanations before each section as a guide to Walter Benjamin’s ideas. These include influential concepts such as the ‘afterlife’ of literary works, the ‘kinship’ of languages, and the metaphysical notion of ‘pure language’. The Age of Translation is a vital read for students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy.

The Scandals of Translation

The Scandals of Translation
Author: Lawrence Venuti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134740638

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

Contra Instrumentalism

Contra Instrumentalism
Author: Lawrence Venuti
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1496215923

Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This "instrumental" model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés. Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life.

Reflexive Translation Studies

Reflexive Translation Studies
Author: Silvia Kadiu
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-04-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 178735251X

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

Translation Criticism- Potentials and Limitations

Translation Criticism- Potentials and Limitations
Author: Katharina Reiss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317642074

Katharina Reiss's now classic contribution to Translation Studies, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik: Kategorien und Kriteren für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen, first appeared in 1971. This is the first English translation of this major work, allowing students and practitioners of translation in the English-speaking world to make more extensive use of Reiss's pioneering treatment of a central theme in translation: how to develop reliable criteria for the systematic evaluation of translations. Using a wealth of interesting and varied examples, Reiss offers a systematic and illuminating text typology, a pragmatic approach to text analysis, a functional perspective on translation and a hermeneutic view of the translator, thus accounting for some of the most important aspects of the translation process: the text (both source and target versions), the conditions which determine the translator's decisions, and the translator as an individual whose personal interpretation has to be respected by any critic. In the three decades since Katharina Reiss wrote, the terminology of translation studies has evolved on many fronts. Erroll Rhodes' translation strikes an optimal balance between remaining faithful to the original presentation and using terminology that today's reader would generally understand and value.

Dramatic Licence

Dramatic Licence
Author: Louise Ladouceur
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2012-12-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0888647069

Translation is tricky business. The translator has to transform the foreign to the familiar while moving and pleasing his or her audience. Louise Ladouceur knows theatre from a multi-dimensional perspective that gives her research a particular authority as she moves between two of the dominant cultures of Canada: French and English. Through the analysis of six plays from each linguistic repertoire, written and translated between 1961 and 2000, her award-winning book compares the complexities of a translation process shaped by the power struggle between Canada's two official languages. The winner of the Prix Gabrielle-Roy and the Ann Saddlemyer Book Award, Dramatic Licence addresses issues important to scholars and students of Translation Studies, Canadian Literature and Theatre Studies, as well as theatre practitioners and translators. The University of Alberta Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities.

Sympathy for the Traitor

Sympathy for the Traitor
Author: Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-04-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262346710

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

Why Translation Matters

Why Translation Matters
Author: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300163037

"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.