Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture


Book Description

This book reflects on translation praxis in 20th century Latin American print culture, tracing the trajectory of linguistic heterogeneity in the region and illuminating collective efforts to counteract the use of translation as a colonial tool and affirm cultural production in Latin America. In investigating the interplay of translation and the Americas as a geopolitical site, Guzmán Martínez unpacks the complex tensions that arise in these “spaces of translation” as embodied in the output of influential publishing houses and periodicals during this time period, looking at translation as both a concept and a set of narrative practices. An exploration of these spaces not only allows for an in-depth analysis of the role of translation in these institutions themselves but also provides a lens through which to uncover linguistic plurality and hybridity past borders of seemingly monolingual ideologies. A concluding chapter looks ahead to the ways in which strategic and critical uses of translation can continue to build on these efforts and contribute toward decolonial narrative practices in translation and enhance cultural production in the Americas in the future. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies, Latin American studies, and comparative literature.




Global Literary Studies


Book Description

While the very existence of global literary studies as an institutionalised field is not yet fully established, the global turn in various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences has been gaining traction in recent years. This book aims to contribute to the field of global literary studies with a more inclusive and decentralising approach. Specifically, it responds to a double demand: the need for expanding openness to other ways of seeing the global literary space by including multiple literary and cultural traditions and other interdisciplinary perspectives in the discussion, and the need for conceptual models and different case studies that will help develop a global approach in four key avenues of research: global translation flows and translation policies, the post-1989 novel as a global form, global literary environments, and a global perspective on film and cinema history. Gathering contributions from international scholars with expertise in various areas of research, the volume is structured around five target concepts: space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. We also take gender and LGBTQ+ perspectives, as well as a digital approach.




Negotiating Linguistic Plurality


Book Description

Cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality are seen as markers of our time, linked to discourses about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the context of economic globalization in the late twentieth century. It is often monolingualism, however, that informs understanding and policies regulating the relationship between languages, nations, and communities. Grounded by the idea of language as lived experience, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes linguistic plurality to be a continuing human condition and offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective on it. The essays featured cover concepts and praxis in which linguistic plurality surfaces in the public sphere through institutional and individual practices. The collection adopts a critical view of language policies and foregrounds distances and dissonances between policy and language practices by presenting lived experiences of multilingualism. Translation, seen as constitutive to the relations inherent to linguistic plurality, is at the core of the volume. Contributors explore a range of social and institutional aspects of the relationship between translation and linguistic plurality, foregrounding less documented experiences and minoritized practices. Presenting knowledge that spans regions, languages, and territories, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality is a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes language plurality: what its limits are, as well as its possibilities.




The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation offers an understanding of translation in Latin America both at a regional and transnational scale. Broad in scope, it is devoted primarily to thinking comprehensively and systematically about the intersection of literary translation and Latin American literature, with a curated selection of original essays that critically engage with translation theories and practices outside of hegemonic Anglo centers. In this introductory volume, through survey and case-study chapters, contributing authors cover literary and cultural translation in the region historically, geographically, and linguistically. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters focus on issues ranging from the role of translation in the construction of national identities to the challenges of translation in the current digital age. Areas of interest expand from the United States to the Southern Cone, including the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as the impact of Latin American literature internationally, and paying attention to translation from and to indigenous languages; Portuguese, English, French, German, Chinese, Spanglish, and more. The first of its kind in English, this Handbook will shed light on different translation approaches and invite a rethinking of intercultural and interlingual exchanges from Latin American viewpoints. This is key reading for all scholars, researchers, and students of literary translation studies, Latin American literature, and comparative literature.




Translation and Epistemicide


Book Description

Translation has facilitated colonialism from the fifteenth century to the present day. Epistemicide, which involves destroying, marginalizing, or banishing Indigenous, subaltern, and counter-hegemonic knowledges, is one result. In the Americas, it is a racializing process. But in the hands of subaltern translators and interpreters, translation has also been used as a decolonial method. The book gives an account of translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas, drawing on a range of examples from the early colonial period to the War on Terror. The first chapters demonstrate four distinct operations of epistemicide: the commensuration of worlds, the epistemic marginalization of subaltern translators and the knowledge they produce, the criminalization of translators and interpreters, and translation as piracy or extractivism. The second part of the book outlines decolonial translation strategies, including an epistemic posture the author calls “bewilderment.” Translation and Epistemicide tracks how through the centuries translation practices have enabled colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge.




A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919–2019)


Book Description

This book delves into the Chinese literary translation landscape over the last century, spanning critical historical periods such as the Cultural Revolution in the greater China region. Contributors from all around the world approach this theme from various angles, providing an overview of translation phenomena at key historical moments, identifying the trends of translation and publication, uncovering the translation history of important works, elucidating the relationship between translators and other agents, articulating the interaction between texts and readers and disclosing the nature of literary migration from Chinese into English. This volume aims at benefiting both academics of translation studies from a dominantly Anglophone culture and researchers in the greater China region. Chinese scholars of translation studies will not only be able to cite this as a reference book, but will be able to discover contrasts, confluence and communication between academics across the globe, which will stimulate, inspire and transform discussions in this field.




Unsettling Translation


Book Description

This collection engages with translation and interpreting from a diverse but complementary range of perspectives, in dialogue with the seminal work of Theo Hermans. A foundational figure in the field, Hermans’s scholarly engagement with translation spans several key areas, including history of translation, metaphor, norms, ethics, ideology, methodology, and the critical reconceptualization of the positioning of the translator and of translation itself as a social and hermeneutic practice. Those he has mentored or inspired through his lectures and pioneering publications over the years are now household names in the field, with many represented in this volume. They come together here both to critically re-examine translation as a social, political and conceptual site of negotiation and to celebrate his contributions to the field. The volume opens with an extended introduction and personal tribute by the editor, which situates Hermans’s work within the broader development of critical thinking about translation from the 1970s onward. This is followed by five parts, each addressing a theme that has been broadly taken up by Theo Hermans in his own work: translational epistemologies; historicizing translation; performing translation; centres and peripheries; and digital encounters. This is important reading for translation scholars, researchers and advanced students on courses covering key trends and theories in translation studies, and those engaging with the history of the discipline. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.




Narratives of Mistranslation


Book Description

This book offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. The volume looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent Latin American novels and short stories in Spanish to shed light on the complex dynamics and conditions under which translators perform their task. Kripper unpacks how the study of these works reveals translation not as an activity with communication as its end goal but rather as a mediating and mediated process shaped by the unique manipulations and motivations of translators and the historical and cultural contexts in which they work. In exploring the fictional representations of translators, the book also outlines pedagogical approaches and offers discussion questions for the implementation of translators’ narratives in translation, language, and literature courses. Narratives of Mistranslation will be of interest to scholars and educators in translation studies, especially those working in literary translation and translation pedagogy, Latin American literature, world literature, and Latin American studies.




Advances in Discourse Analysis of Translation and Interpreting


Book Description

This edited thematic collection features latest developments of discourse analysis in translation and interpreting studies. It investigates the process of how cultural and ideological intervention is conducted in translation and interpreting using a wide array of discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistic approaches and drawing on empirical data from the Chinese context. The book is divided into four main sections: I. uncovering positioning and ideology in interpreting and translation, II. linking linguistic approach with socio-cultural interpretation, III. discourse analysis into news translation and IV. analysis of multimodal and intersemiotic discourse in translation. The different approaches to discourse analysis provide a much-needed contribution to the field of translation and interpreting studies. This combination of discourse analysis and corpus analysis demonstrates the interconnectedness of these fields and offers a rich source of conceptual and methodological tools. This book will appeal to scholars and research students in translation and interpreting studies, cross-linguistic discourse analysis and Chinese studies.




Borges and Translation


Book Description

This book studies how Borges constructs a theory of translation that plays a fundamental role in the development of Argentine literature, and which, in turn, expands the potential for writers in Latin America to create new and innovative literatures through processes of re-reading, rewriting, and mis-translation. The book analyzes Borges's texts in both an Argentine and a transnational context, thus incorporating Borges's ideas into contemporary debates about translation and its relationship to language and aesthetics, Latin American culture and identity, tradition and originality, and center-periphery dichotomies. Furthermore, a central objective of this book is to show that the study of the importance of translation in Borges and of the importance of Borges for translation studies need not be separated. Furthermore, translation studies has much to gain by the inclusion of Latin American thinkers such as Borges, while literary studies has much to gain by in-depth considerations of the role of translation in Latin American literatures. Sergio Waisman is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University.