This definitive collection is the first comprehensive reader on the fast-growing field of translation studies. Concentrating on the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the past thirty years, Lawrence Venuti has chosen a wide range of readings on translation, placing each selection within its social, thematic, and historical context. The Reader is divided into five chronological sections, with each section prefaced by an introductory essay, a detailed bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The Reader also features a new essay by Lawrence Venuti on the future of Translation Studies.

Paperback:  544 pages
Language:  English
ISBN:  0415187478
Author/Editor:  Lawrence Venuti (2000)

This ground-breaking encyclopedia explores translation studies, currently developing into a serious field of study, with its own vocabulary, theories, and research. Baker (translation studies, Univ. of Manchester Inst. of Science and Technology) has gathered an impressive group of contributors, including Umberto Eco, Theo Mermnas, Luis Kelly, and Judith Woodsworth, to create an encyclopedia that defines this new discipline. The first part, a dictionary section, explains and defines the vocabulary and concepts in signed entries ranging from two to six pages. Entries include cross references and suggestions for further reading. The second section introduces the translation traditions of 31 cultures, including African, Greek, Chinese, Russian, and French. Each of these lengthy entries includes a history of translation in the culture, theories at work, biographies, and further reading. The complexity of communication, the direction of the academic discipline, and the richness of translation activity are all clearly illustrated. A 55-page bibliography, an introductory overview, and an exhaustive index round out this essential purchase for all academic libraries.?Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA

Paperback  680 pages
Language:  English
ISBN:  0415255171
Author/Editor:  Mona Baker (2001)

The author's purpose, he says in the preface, is to provide guidelines to "work our way through, to use a Borgesian metaphor, the seemingly infinite labyrinth of forking paths" (read choices) in doing a literary translation. Additionally, his is "a practical, not a theoretical guide. While I have no quarrel with theorists, in theory at least, this is a get-your-hands-dirty, wrestle-with-reality type of book." Its content speaks to Landers's success in achieving his goal. He sets the brisk, colloquial, and often irreverent tone on the opening page, where he reproduces his translation of a "Night Drive," a chilling vignette by the noted Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca. From there he deals, often episodically, with questions of technique such as: Getting started, stages of translation, fluency and transparency, adaptation vs. translation, tone, register, and other topics beginning and more experienced translators need to know. There are also items not to be found in more conventional texts: A day in the life of a literary translation, the hijacked author, when not to translate cultural cues, fiction and footnotes, pornography or "pornography?", English before there was English, and my favorite, "stalking the treacherous typo." In the book's less exciting but necessary final section, "The Working Translator," Landers deals with more mundane matters-e.g., translator's tools such as dictionaries and reference books, taxes, setting a fee, workspaces, contracts, and copyright. Several typographical errors (one of the most amusing is Stewart Potter for Potter Stewart) will hopefully be corrected in a future edition, and an index would have been useful. Still, this is the most up-to-date and readable of any work aiming at the would-be literary translator.

Paperback:  230 pages
Language:  English
ISBN:  1853595195
Author/Editor:  Clifford E. Landers (2001)

This major new introduction to comparative literature is for the students coming to the subject for the first time. Through an examination of a series of case studies and new theoretical developments, Bassnett reviews the current state of comparative literature world-wide in the 1990s.

Paperback:  183 pages
Language:  English
ISBN:  0631167056
Author/Editor:  Susan Bassnett (1993)

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world.

In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators.

Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

Paperback:  336 pages
Language:  English
ISBN:  0691049866
Author/Editor:  David Damrosch (2003)