S. Bermann – A Companion to Translation Studies (2014)

Автор: S. Bermann
Название книги: A Companion to Translation Studies
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 656
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This companion offers a wide-ranging introduction to the rapidly expanding field of translation studies, bringing together some of the best recent scholarship to present its most important current themes

Features new work from well-known scholars
Includes a broad range of geo-linguistic and theoretical perspectives
Offers an up-to-date overview of an expanding field
A thorough introduction to translation studies for both undergraduates and graduates
Multi-disciplinary relevance for students with diverse career goals

Translation has played a major role in human history from the earliest times. Evidence
of this singular activity, one deeply implicating our sense of language, identity, and
intercultural communication, can be found in the clay tablets of the ancient Near East
and continues powerfully in the information technology of the twenty-first century.
It has accompanied the conquests of princes and movements of empires, the routes of
trade, and human migration from ancient times to the present. Wherever people have
brought new languages and cultures, translation has been there, variously transforming
societies, texts, and traditions. Moreover, as psychoanalysts, poets, and theorists
remind us, translation plays a crucial, if less often discussed, role in the development
of individual subjectivity, agency, and identity.
Translation has most often done its work in the shadows of official history. But it
has begun to grow in visibility with the globalizing culture of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Across the planet, translation inflects the arts and entertainment,
daily conversations, news and information technologies, as well as business,
trade, finance, law, government, education, military, and scientific research. Its effects
and complexities have generated themes for novels, feature films, and countless Internet
sites, while the word “translation” itself has become a metaphor for transformation
or transposition of many kinds. Increasingly a site of theoretical reflection, translation’s
role in representing self and other in complicated hierarchies of power, in
staging the performance of sexualities, in posing ethical questions, and in constructing
linguistic and cultural histories has been increasingly acknowledged. As Bella Brodzki
starkly puts it, translation today is seen to “underwrite all cultural transactions, from
the most benign to the most venal” (Brodzki 2007, 2) and scholars have begun to speak of a “translation turn” in the humanities and social sciences.1 But though translation’s
part in past and present history has become more visible, it is not yet very
well understood and not always carefully studied. The purpose of this book is to
explore this social and linguistic practice more fully through the lively discipline that
has recently developed to study it