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Benjamins Translation Library
The Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) aims to stimulate research and training in Translation & Interpreting Studies - taken very broadly to encompass the many different forms and manifestations of translational phenomena, among them cultural translation, localization, adaptation, literary translation, specialized translation, audiovisual translation, audio-description, transcreation, transediting, conference interpreting, and interpreting in community settings (courts, police, healthcare, social services, etc.) in the spoken and signed modalities – as well as the fuzzy boundaries between professional and amateur transfer and the crossroads between translation studies and other (sub)disciplines.
The BTL seeks to revisit and expand the current boundaries of the ever-evolving discipline by providing a forum for exploring this rich array of themes and approaches, in a variety of epistemological, methodological, social, cultural, historical, technological and pedagogical contexts. In the process, it develops - and challenges - existing theoretical and methodological frameworks, or puts existing ones to the test. Each volume represents an original scholarly endeavor - whether in the form of a monograph, a collective volume, a reference work or a postgraduate textbook.
The European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Subseries is a publication channel within the Library to optimize EST’s function as a forum for the translation and interpreting research community. It promotes new trends in research, gives more visibility to young scholars’ work, publicizes new research methods, makes available documents from EST, and reissues classical works in translation studies which do not exist in English or which are now out of print.
81 - 100 of 163 results
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Memes of Translation
Author(s): Andrew ChestermanPublication Date February 2016More LessThis revised edition of Memes of Translation includes updates that relate the book's themes to more recent research in Translation Studies. The book contributes to the debate about whether it is worth seeking a coherent theory of translation, by proposing an approach based on norms, strategies and values, which are all seen as kinds of memes, i.e. ideas that spread. The meme metaphor allows us to see translation in the context of cultural evolution, and also highlights similarities with the philosopher Karl Popper's analysis of another kind of evolution: that of scientific knowledge. A translation is, after all, itself a theory – a theory about the source text. And as Popper stressed, theories of all kinds are like nets we make in order to catch something of reality: never perfectly, but always in the hope of better understanding.
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Memes of Translation
Author(s): Andrew ChestermanPublication Date June 1997More LessMemes of Translation is a search for coherence in translation theory based on the notion of Memes: ideas that spread, develop and replicate, like genes. The author explores a wide range of ideas on translation, mapping the “meme pool” of translation theory with chapters on translation history, norms, strategies, assessment, ethics, and translator training. The aim of the book is to search for a perspective from which the immense variety of ideas about translation can be related.
The unifying thread is the philosophy of Karl Popper. The book proposes the beginnings of a Popperian theory of translation, based on the fundamental concepts of norms, strategies, and values. A key idea is that a translation itself is a theory or hypothesis concerning the source text. This hypothesis is then subjected to testing, refinement, and perhaps even rejection, just like any other hypothesis.
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Methods and Strategies of Process Research
Editor(s): Cecilia Alvstad, Adelina Hild and Elisabet TiseliusPublication Date July 2011More LessThe volume includes contributions on the cognitive processes underlying translation and interpreting, which represent innovative research with a methodological and empirical orientation. The methodological section offers an assessment/validation of different time lag measures; discusses the challenges of interpreting keystroke and eye-tracking data in translation, and triangulating disfluency analysis and eye-tracking data in sight translation research. The remainder of the volume features empirical studies on such topics as: metaphor comprehension; audience perception in subtitling research; translation and meta-linguistic awareness; effect of language-pair specific factors on interpreting quality. A special section is dedicated to expertise studies which look at the link between problem analysis and meta-knowledge in experienced translators; the effects of linguistic complexity on expert interpreting; strategic processing and tacit knowledge in professional interpreting.
The volume celebrates the work of Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and her contribution to the development of process-oriented research.
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The Moving Text
Author(s): Anthony PymPublication Date February 2004More LessFor the discourse of localization, translation is often "just a language problem". For translation theorists, localization introduces fancy words but nothing essentially new. Both views are probably right, but only to an extent. This book sets up a dialogue across those differences. Is there anything that translation theory can gain from localization? Can localization theory learn anything from the history and complexity of translation? To address those questions, both terms are placed within a more general frame, that of text transfer. Texts are distributed in time and space; localization and translation respond differently to those movements; their relative virtues are thus brought out on common ground.
Anthony Pym here reviews not only key problems in translation theory, but also critical concepts such as cultural resistance, variable transaction costs, segmentation of the labour market, and the dehumanization of technical discourse. The book closes with a plea for the humanizing virtues of translation, over and above the efficiencies of localization.
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(Multi) Media Translation
Editor(s): Yves Gambier and Henrik GottliebPublication Date September 2001More LessThe globalisation of communication networks has increased the domains of translation and is challenging ever more the translator’s role. This volume is a collection of contributions from two different conferences (Misano, 1997 and Berlin, 1998). (Multi)Media translation, especially screen translation (TV, cinema, video), has made more explicit the complexities of any communication and has led us to take a fresh look at the translator’s strategies and behaviours.Several papers ponder the concepts of media and multimedia, the necessity of interdisciplinarity, the polysemiotic dimension of audiovisual media. Quite a few discuss the current transformations in audiovisual media policy. A great many deal with practices, mainly in subtitling but also in interpreting for TV and surtitling: what are the quality parameters and the conditions to meet audience’s expectations?
Finally some show the cultural and linguistic implications of screen translation. Digitalisation is changing production and broadcasting and speeding up convergence between media, telecommunications and information and communication technology.
Is (multi)media translation a new field of study or an umbrella framework for scholars from various disciplines? Is it a trick to overcome the absence of prestige in Translation Studies? Or is it just a buzz word which gives rise to confusion? These questions remain open: the 26 contributions are partial answers.
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Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom
Author(s): Maria González-DaviesPublication Date July 2004More LessThe main aim of this book is to provide teaching ideas that can be adapted to different learning environments and that can be used with different language combinations. The pedagogical approach and the activities, tasks and projects are based on Communicative, Humanistic and Socioconstructivist principles: the students are actively involved in their learning process by making decisions and interacting with each other in a classroom setting that is a discussion forum and hands-on workshop.Clear aims are specified for the activities, which move from the most rudimentary level of the word, to the more complicated issues of syntax and, finally, to those of cultural difference. Moreover, they attempt to synthesize various translation theories, not only those based on linguistics, but those derived from cultural studies as well.
This volume will be of interest to translation teachers, to foreign language teachers who wish to include translation in their classes, to graduates and professional translators interested in becoming teachers, and also to administrators exploring the possibility of starting a new translation programme.
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The Neurocognition of Translation and Interpreting
Author(s): Adolfo M. GarcíaPublication Date June 2019More LessThis groundbreaking work offers a comprehensive account of brain-based research on translation and interpreting. First, the volume introduces the methodological and conceptual pillars of psychobiological approaches vis-à-vis those of other cognitive frameworks. Next, it systematizes neuropsychological, neuroscientific, and behavioral evidence on key topics, including the lateralization of networks subserving cross-linguistic processes; their relation with other linguistic mechanisms; the functional organization and temporal dynamics of the circuits engaged by different translation directions, processing levels, and source-language units; the system’s susceptibility to training-induced plasticity; and the outward correlates of its main operations. Lastly, the book discusses the field’s accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and requirements. Its authoritative yet picturesque, didactic style renders it accessible to researchers in cognitive translatology, bilingualism, and neurolinguistics, as well as teachers and practitioners in related areas. Succinctly, this piece establishes a much-needed platform for translation and interpreting studies to fruitfully interact with cognitive neuroscience.
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New Insights in the History of Interpreting
Editor(s): Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-JalónPublication Date March 2016More LessWho mediated intercultural exchanges in 9th-century East Asia or in early voyages to the Americas? Did the Soviets or the Americans invent simultaneous interpreting equipment? How did the US government train its first Chinese interpreters? Why is it that Taiwanese interpreters were executed for Japanese war crimes? Bringing together papers from an international symposium held at Rikkyo University in 2014 along with two select pieces, this volume pursues such questions in an eclectic exploration of the practice of interpreting, the recruitment of interpreters, and the challenges interpreters have faced in diplomacy, colonization, religion, war, and occupation. It also introduces innovative use of photography, artifacts, personal journals, and fiction as tools for the historical study of interpreters and interpreting. Targeted at practitioners, scholars, and students of interpreting, translation, and history, the new insights presented in the ten original articles aim to spark discussion and research on the vital roles interpreters have played in intercultural communication through history.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Non-professional Interpreting and Translation
Editor(s): Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato and Ira TorresiPublication Date June 2017More LessIn the light of recent waves of mass immigration, non-professional interpreting and translation (NPIT) is spreading at an unprecedented pace. While as recently as the late 20th century much of the field was a largely uncharted territory, the current proportions of NPIT suggest that the phenomenon is here to stay and needs to be studied with all due academic rigour.
This collection of essays is the first systematic attempt at looking at NPIT in a scholarly and at the same time pragmatic way. Offering multiple methods and perspectives, and covering the diverse contexts in which NPIT takes place, the volume is a welcome turn in an all too often polarized debate in both academic and practitioner circles.
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Nonverbal Communication and Translation
Editor(s): Fernando PoyatosPublication Date April 1997More LessThis is the first book, within the interdisciplinary field of Nonverbal Communication Studies, dealing with the specific tasks and problems involved in the translation of literary works as well as film and television texts, and in the live experience of simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. The theoretical and methodological ideas and models it contains should merit the interest not only of students of literature, professional translators and translatologists, interpreters, and those engaged in film and television dubbing, but also to literary readers, film and theatergoers, linguists and psycholinguists, semioticians, communicologists, and crosscultural anthropologists. Its sixteen contributions by translation scholars and professional interpreters from fifteen countries, deal with discourse in translation, intercultural problems, narrative literature, theater, poetry, interpretation, and film and television dubbing.
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On Translator Ethics
Author(s): Anthony PymPublication Date October 2012More LessThis is about people, not texts – a translator ethics seeks to embrace the intercultural identity of the translatory subject, in its full array of possible actions.
Based on seminars originally given at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, this translation from French has been fully revised by the author and extended to include critical commentaries on activist translation theory, non-professional translation, interventionist practices, and the impact of new translation technologies. The result takes the traditional discussion of ethics into the way mediators can actively create cooperation between cultures, while at the same time addressing very practical questions such as when one should translate or not translate, how much translators should charge, or whose side they should be on.
On Translator Ethics offers a point of reference for the key debates in contemporary Translation Studies.
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Opera in Translation
Editor(s): Adriana Şerban and Kelly Kar Yue ChanPublication Date October 2020More LessThis volume covers aspects of opera translation within the Western world and in Asia, as well as some of opera’s many travels between continents, countries, languages and cultures—and also between genres and media. The concept of ‘adaptation’ is a thread running through the sixteen contributions, which encompass a variety of composers, operas, periods and national traditions. Sung translation, libretto translation, surtitling, subtitling are discussed from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Exploration of aspects such as the relationship between language and music, multimodality, intertextuality, cultural and linguistic transfer, multilingualism, humour, identity and stereotype, political ideology, the translator’s voice and the role of the audience is driven by a shared motivation: a love of opera and of the beauty it has never ceased to provide through the centuries, and admiration for the people who write, compose, perform, direct, translate, or otherwise contribute to making the joy of opera a part of our lives.
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Poetry Translating as Expert Action
Author(s): Francis JonesPublication Date July 2011More LessPoetry is a highly valued form of human expression, and poems are challenging texts to translate. For both reasons, people willingly work long and hard to translate them, for little pay but potentially high personal satisfaction. This book shows how experienced poetry translators translate poems and bring them to readers, and how they not only shape new poems, but also help communicate images of the source culture. It uses cognitive and sociological translation-studies methods to analyse real data, most of it from two contrasting source countries, the Netherlands and Bosnia. Case studies, including think-aloud studies, analyse how translators translate poems. In interviews, translators explain why and how they translate. And a 17-year survey of a country’s poetry-translation output explores how translators work within networks of other people and texts – publishing teams, fellow translators, source-culture enthusiasts, and translation readers and critics. In mapping the whole sweep of poetry translators’ action, from micro-cognitive to macro-social, this book gives the first translation-studies overview of poetry translating since the 1970s.
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The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction
Author(s): Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim AiboPublication Date February 2020More LessStarting with the premise that aesthetic choices reveal the ideological stances of translators, the author of this research monograph examines works of fiction by postcolonial African authors writing in English or French, the genesis and reception of their works, and the translation of each one into French or English. Texts include those by Nuruddin Farah from Somalia, Abdourahman Ali Waberi from Djibouti, Jean-Marie Adiaffi from Côte d’Ivoire, Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana, Chenjerai Hove from Zimbabwe, and Assia Djebar from Algeria, and their translations by Jacqueline Bardolph, Jeanne Garane, Brigitte Katiyo, Jean-Pierre Richard, Josette and Robert Mane, and Dorothy Blair.
The author highlights the aural poetics of these works, explores the sound motifs underlying their literary power, and shows how each is articulated with the writer’s literary heritage. She then embarks on a close examination of each translator’s background, followed by a rich analysis of their treatments of sound. The translators’ strategies for addressing sound motifs are contextualized in the larger framework of postcolonial literatures and changing reading materialities.
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The Possibility of Language
Author(s): Alan K. Melby and Terry WarnerPublication Date December 1995More LessThis book is about the limits of machine translation. It is widely recognized that machine translation systems do much better on domain-specific controlled-language texts (domain texts for short) than on dynamic general-language texts (general texts for short). The authors explore this general — domain distinction and come to some uncommon conclusions about the nature of language. Domain language is claimed to be made possible by general language, while general language is claimed to be made possible by the ethical dimensions of relationships. Domain language is unharmed by the constraints of objectivism, while general language is suffocated by those constraints. Along the way to these conclusions, visits are made to Descartes and Saussure, to Chomsky and Lakoff, to Wittgenstein and Levinas. From these conclusions, consequences are drawn for machine translation and translator tools, for linguistic theory and translation theory. The title of the book does not question whether language is possible; it asks, with wonder and awe, why communication through language is possible.
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Post-Socialist Translation Practices
Author(s): Nike K. PokornPublication Date October 2012More LessThe book Post-Socialist Translation Practices explores how Communism and Socialism, through their hegemonic pressure, found expression in translation practice from the moment of Socialist revolution to the present day. Based on extensive archival research in the archives of the Communist Party and on the interviews with translators and editors of the period the book attempts to outline the typical and defining features of the Socialist translatorial behaviour by re-reading more than 200 translations of children's literature and juvenile fiction published in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Despite the variety of different forms of censorship that the translators in all Socialist states were subject to, the book argues that Socialist translation in different cultural and linguistic environments, especially where the Soviet model tried to impose itself, purged the translated texts of the same or similar elements, in particular of the religious presence. The book also traces how ideologically manipulated translations are still uncritically reprinted and widely circulated today.
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Postcolonial Polysystems
Author(s): Haidee KrugerPublication Date December 2012More LessPostcolonial Polysystems: The Production and Reception of Translated Children’s Literature in South Africa is an original and provocative contribution to the field of children’s literature research and translation studies. It draws on a variety of methodologies to provide a perspective, both product- and process-oriented, on the ways in which translation contributes to the production of children’s literature in South Africa, with a special interest in language and power, as well as post- and neocolonial hybridity. The book explores the forces that affect the use of translation in producing children’s literature in various languages in South Africa, and shows how some of these forces precipitate in the selection, production and reception of translated children’s books in Afrikaans and English. It breaks new ground in its interrogation of aspects of translation theory within the multilingual and postcolonial context of South Africa, as well as in its innovative experimental investigation of the reception of domesticating and foreignising strategies in translated picture books. The book has won the 2013 EST Young Scholar Prize.
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The Practice of Court Interpreting
Author(s): Alicia B. EdwardsPublication Date July 1995More LessThe Practice of Court Interpreting describes how the interpreter works in the court room and other legal settings. The book discusses what is involved in court interpreting: case preparation, ethics and procedure, the creation and avoidance of error, translation and legal documents, tape transcription and translation, testifying as an expert witness, and continuing education outside the classroom.
The purpose of the book is to provide the interpreter with a map of the terrain and to suggest methods that will help insure an accurate result. The author, herself a practicing court interpreter, says: “The structure of the book follows the structure of the work as we do it.”
The book is intended as a basic course book, as background reading for practicing court interpreters and for court officials who deal with interpreters.
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Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting
Editor(s): Aline Ferreira and John W. SchwieterPublication Date January 2015More LessPsycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting presents perspectives and original studies that aim to diversify traditional approaches in translation and interpreting research and improve the quality and generalizability of the field. The volume is divided into two parts: Part I includes an introductory discussion on the input of psycholinguistics and cognitive science to translation and interpreting along with two state-of-the-art chapters that discuss valid experimental designs while critically reviewing and building on existing work. Part II subsequently presents original studies which explore the performance of expert and novice translators using a variety of methodologies such as eye tracking, keystroke logging, retrospective protocols, and post-editing machine translation. It also presents contributions for exploratory studies on interpreting and for testing several constructs such as language competence and the role of expertise, redundancy, and working memory capacity. This volume is intended to act as a valuable reference for scholars, practitioners, translators, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and anyone wishing to gain an overview of current issues in translation and interpreting from psycholinguistic and cognitive domains.
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Questions for Translation Studies
Author(s): Douglas RobinsonPublication Date August 2023More LessThis is a book in the classical Quaestiones genre, like the Tusculanae Quaestiones (“Tusculan questions”) of Cicero (around 45 BCE) and the Quæstiones disputatæ de Veritate (“disputed questions on truth”) of St. Thomas Aquinas (1256-1259). It seeks to ask seven series of questions about key theoretical approaches to the study of translation: three on equivalence theories (semantic equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and deverbalization), three on Descriptive Translation Studies (norms, Toury’s laws, and the translator’s narratoriality), and one on the translator’s visibility. Each “Question” (chapter) charts a circuitous course through past answers to new questions and new answers, drawing especially on the theoretical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and 4EA cognitive science. The book will guide both veteran and novice scholars of translation deep into the complexities besetting the seven keywords.
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