The Elusive Fox


Book Description

Considered one of Morocco’s most important contemporary writers, Muhammad Zafzaf created stories of alterity, compassionate tales inhabited by prostitutes, thieves, and addicts living in the margins of society. In The Elusive Fox, Zafzaf’s first novel to be translated into English, a young teacher visits the coastal city of Essaouira in the 1960s. There he meets a group of European bohemians and local Moroccans and is exposed to the grittier side of society. More than a novel, The Elusive Fox is a portrait of a city during a time of fluid cultural and political mores in Morocco.




This Little Art


Book Description

Part-essay and part-memoir, 'This Little Art' is a manifesto for the practice of literary translation.




Contemporary Translation Theories


Book Description

"This revised second edition productively updates each of the approaches, incorporating the latest research, and adds a new conclusion addressing the future of translation studies. Offering new insights into the nature of translation, language, and cross-cultural communication, the book will interest students and specialists in translation, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.




Translating Happiness


Book Description

How embracing untranslatable terms for well-being—from the Finnish sisu to the Yiddish mensch—can enrich our emotional understanding and experience. Western psychology is rooted in the philosophies and epistemologies of Western culture. But what of concepts and insights from outside this frame of reference? Certain terms not easily translatable into English—for example, nirvāṇa (from Sanskrit), or agápē (from Classical Greek), or turangawaewae (from Māori)—are rich with meaning but largely unavailable to English-speaking students and seekers of wellbeing. In this book, Tim Lomas argues that engaging with “untranslatable” terms related to well-being can enrich not only our understanding but also our experience. We can use these words, Lomas suggests, to understand and express feelings and experiences that were previously inexpressible. Lomas examines 400 words from 80 languages, arranges them thematically, and develops a theoretical framework that highlights the varied dimensions of well-being and traces the connections between them. He identifies three basic dimensions of well-being—feelings, relationships, and personal development—and then explores each in turn through untranslatable words. Ânanda, for example, usually translated as bliss, can have spiritual associations in Buddhist and Hindu contexts; kefi in Greek expresses an intense emotional state—often made more intense by alcohol. The Japanese concept of koi no yokan means a premonition or presentiment of love, capturing the elusive and vertiginous feeling of being about to fall for someone, imbued with melancholy and uncertainty; the Yiddish term mensch has been borrowed from its Judaic and religious connotations to describe an all-around good human being; and Finnish offers sisu—inner determination in the face of adversity. Expanding the lexicon of well-being in this way showcases the richness of cultural diversity while reminding us powerfully of our common humanity. Lomas's website, www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography, allows interested readers to contribute their own words and interpretations.




Lost in Translation


Book Description

From the author of Eating the Sun, an artistic collection of more than 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there’s a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don’t have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions. Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. In this clever and beautifully rendered exploration of the subtleties of communication, you’ll find new ways to express yourself while getting lost in the artistry of imperfect translation.




A Qualitative Approach to Translation Studies


Book Description

This collection invites readers to explore innovative or underexploited ways of working qualitatively with what in Translation Studies may be termed as elusive constructs. The volume adopts a functionalist approach to focus on one such concept, namely the notion of translation problem, using case studies to illustrate how a significant elusive construct can be addressed empirically. It explores different qualitative research methodologies which, although well established in other fields, are yet to be extensively used in TS but which may nevertheless prove to be of significance for future studies as they allow elusive concepts typically found in TS to be worked with more coherently. Chapters are structured around two core ideas: first, the qualitative, systematic analysis of source text content with emphasis on the detection of translation problems as a means of creating efficient frameworks for coherent decision-making from a functional perspective; and secondly, the practical process of stereotyping and profiling specific problems within different contexts, content types or services to help identify, manage and resolve them in a number of settings, from research to professional translator training and assessment environments. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, particularly those with an interest in qualitative approaches.




Translating the World


Book Description

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.




The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse and ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. As the first extended collection to offer perspectives on translation and activism from a global perspective, this handbook includes case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised people from over twenty different languages. The contributions will make visible the role of translation in promoting and enabling social change, in promoting equality, in fighting discrimination, in supporting human rights, and in challenging autocracy and injustice across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe. With a substantial introduction, thirty-one chapters, and an extensive bibliography, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all activists, translators, students and researchers of translation and activism within translation and interpreting studies.




The Craft of Translation


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.




Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation


Book Description

The notion of voice has been used in a number of ways within Translation Studies. Against the backdrop of these different uses, this book looks at the voices of translators, authors, publishers, editors and readers both in the translations themselves and in the texts that surround these translations. The various authors go on a hunt for translational agents’ voice imprints in a variety of textual and contextual material, such as literary and non-literary translations, book reviews, newspaper articles, academic texts and e-mails. While all stick to the principle of studying text and context together, the different contributions also demonstrate how specific textual and contextual circumstances require adapted methodological solutions, ending up in a collection that takes steps in a joint direction but that is at the same time complex and pluralistic. The book is intended for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and other disciplines within Language and Literature.