The Craft of Translation

Author: John Biguenet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226048697
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
These essays offer 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. --From publisher's description.

Art of Translating Prose

Author: Burton Raffel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039051
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description

Theories of Translation

Author: Rainer Schulte
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618482X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
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.

Sympathy for the Traitor

Author: Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262346710
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
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.”

In Translation

Author: Esther Allen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231535023
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The most comprehensive collection of perspectives on translation to date, this anthology features essays by some of the world's most skillful writers and translators, including Haruki Murakami, Alice Kaplan, Peter Cole, Eliot Weinberger, Forrest Gander, Clare Cavanagh, David Bellos, and José Manuel Prieto. Discussing the process and possibilities of their art, they cast translation as a fine balance between scholarly and creative expression. The volume provides students and professionals with much-needed guidance on technique and style, while affirming for all readers the cultural, political, and aesthetic relevance of translation. These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization. Responding to the growing popularity of translation programs, literature in translation, and the increasing need to cultivate versatile practitioners, this anthology serves as a definitive resource for those seeking a modern understanding of the craft.

Thinking Through Translation

Author: Jeffrey M. Green
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Punctuated by thoughtful wit, this engaging volume of essays offers Jeffrey M. Green's personal and theoretical ruminations on the profession of translation. Green begins many of the essays by relating the specific techniques and problems associated with translating from Hebrew texts. From this intimate perspective, he forges wise reflections on such subjects as identifying and preserving the writer's voice, the cultural significance of translations and their contents, the research and travel that are part of a translator's everyday life, and the frequent puzzles associated with the craft. Green combines a contemporary frankness about the financial, practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of translation with an aspiration to write “like a good literary critic of the old school”—considering the moral and spiritual implications of the translation as well as its content. Thinking Through Translation shows us, with eloquent honesty, that translation is a delicate art and skill, and presents the trade as a way of attaining insight about history, the world, and oneself.

Why Translation Matters

Author: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300163037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
"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.

Performing Without a Stage

Author: Robert Wechsler
Publisher: Catbird Press
ISBN: 9780945774389
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
Performing Without a Stage is a lively and comprehensive introduction to the art of literary translation for readers of foreign fiction and poetry who wonder what it takes to translate, how the art of literary translation has changed over the centuries, what problems translators face in bringing foreign works into English and how they go about solving these problems. This book will also be of interest to translators, writers, editors, critics, and literature students, dealing as it does, often controversially, with such matters as the translator's fidelity to the author, the publishing and reviewing of translations, the nearly nonexistent public image of the stageless translator, and the value for writers and scholars of studying and practicing translation.

Translating For Singing

Author: Ronnie Apter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472571916
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Translating for Singing discusses the art and craft of translating singable lyrics, a topic of interest in a wide range of fields, including translation, music, creative writing, cultural studies, performance studies, and semiotics. Previously, such translation has most often been discussed by music critics, many of whom had neither training nor experience in this area. Written by two internationally-known translators, the book focusses mainly on practical techniques for creating translations meant to be sung to pre-existing music, with suggested solutions to such linguistic problems as those associated with rhythm, syllable count, vocal burden, rhyme, repetition and sound. Translation theory and translations of lyrics for other purposes, such as surtitles, are also covered. The book can serve as a primary text in courses on translating lyrics and as a reference and supplementary text for other courses and for professionals in the fields mentioned. Beyond academia, the book is of interest to professional translators and to librettists, singers, conductors, stage directors, and audience members.

If this be Treason

Author: Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216654
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
Gregory Rabassa's influence as a translator is incalculable. His translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch have helped make these some of the most widely read and respected works in world literature. (Garcia Marquez was known to say that the English translation of One Hundred Years was better than the Spanish original.) In If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents Rabassa offers a cool-headed and humorous defense of translation, laying out his views on the art of the craft. Anecdotal, and always illuminating, If This Be Treason traces Rabassa's career, from his boyhood on a New Hampshire farm, his school days "collecting" languages, the two-and-a-half years he spent overseas during WWII, his travels, until one day "I signed a contract to do my first translation of a long work [Cortazar's Hopscotch] for a commercial publisher." Rabassa concludes with his "rap sheet," a consideration of the various authors and the over 40 works he has translated. This long-awaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.