The fascinating process of translation in its many varieties is the subject of the essays in this book. Five of the essays discuss the theoretical aspects common to all works of translation. Other essays elucidate the particular processes of translating literature, drama, social science, classics, and songs. How computers can assist in translation and the economics of translation are the subjects of two of the essays. Considering translation as a discipline, the sixteen authors of these essays provide a complete perspective on translation for students considering translation as a career and for anyone interested in how a translation is made.

Translation, interpreting and translatology face major challenges today, as new technologies provide new ways of investigating our profession, analysing the process of performing these acts of linguistic mediation, or the outcome of our work, and even permit a fresh look at old data. However, aside from a certain improvement in terms of research possibilities, what else does the future hold for translation and interpreting? This volume proposes the label Translation 4.0, suggesting that contemporary translation should actually be understood as programmatic as expressions such as Industry 4.0 and Internet 4.0, which are often used to refer to the increasing application of Internet technology to facilitate communication between humans, machines and products. As the book shows, Translation 4.0 is at least undergoing a process of formation, if it is not already fully developed. The contributions here not only look into developments in translation and interpreting per se, but also explore the consequences of digitalisation for research in this field.

This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics, critics, and readers, as well as authors themselves. This volume therefore substantiates, refines, as well as interrogates current approaches to world literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its methodological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of the volume’s focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 is a history of the emotional, ideological, informational, and technical power and meaning of books and libraries in the aftermath of World War II, examined through the cultural reconstruction activities undertaken by the Libraries Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The book focuses on the key actors and on-the-ground work of the Libraries Section in four central areas: empowering libraries around the world to acquire the books they wanted and needed; facilitating expanded global production of quality translations and affordable books; participating in debates over the contested fate of confiscated books and displaced libraries; and formulating notions of cultural rights as human rights. Through examples from France, Poland, and surviving Jewish Europe, this book provides new insight into the complexities and specificities of UNESCO’s role in the realm of books, libraries, and networks of information exchange during the early postwar, post-Holocaust, Cold War years.