For all that Cicero is often seen as the father of translation theory, his and other Roman comments on translation are often divorced from the complicated environments that produced them. The first book-length study in English of its kind, Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source explores translation as it occurred in Rome and presents a complete, culturally integrated discourse on its theories from 240 BCE to the 2nd Century CE. Author Siobhán McElduff analyzes Roman methods of translation, connects specific events and controversies in the Roman Empire to larger cultural discussions about translation, and delves into the histories of various Roman translators, examining how their circumstances influenced their experience of translation. This book illustrates that as a translating culture, a culture reckoning with the consequences of building its own literature upon that of a conquered nation, and one with an enormous impact upon the West, Rome's translators and their theories of translation deserve to be treated and discussed as a complex and sophisticated phenomenon. Roman Theories of Translation enables Roman writers on translation to take their rightful place in the history of translation and translation theory.

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.

At Master’s level, students in Translation Studies may choose to complete their course by compiling a dissertation by commentary. Such projects involve detailed discussions of the strategies and procedures that students opt for when translating a source text of their choice (be it literary, audiovisual, or technical). However, the vast majority of these dissertations by commentary usually remain stored in university libraries. Achieving Consilience: Translation Theories and Practice brings to the fore the theoretical and practical potential of these dissertations by commentary. It demonstrates how theories in Translation Studies can be fruitfully, consciously and systematically applied during the translation practice, thus helping to transcend the received wisdom according to which theorists and practitioners share little common ground. Additionally, the contributors to this volume evince their ability to apply a research-driven approach to their analysis by comparing their work with official translations or other field-related texts. As such, this essay collection will contribute to a better understanding of the translator’s decision-making process, and will offer future students valuable guidelines regarding the procedure normally followed in completing a dissertation by commentary.

As long as there has been a need for language, there has been a need for translation; yet there is remarkably little scholarship available on pre-modern translation and translators. This exciting and innovative volume opens a window onto the complex world of translation in the multilingual and multicultural milieu of the ancient Mediterranean. From the biographies of emperors to Hittites scribes in the second millennium BCE to a Greek speaking Syrian slyly resisting translation under the Roman empire, the papers in this volume – fresh and innovative contributions by new and established scholars from a variety of disciplines including Classics, Near Eastern Studies, Biblical Studies, and Egyptology – show that translation has always been a phenomenon to be reckoned with. Accessible and of interest to scholars of translation studies and of the ancient Mediterranean, the contributions in Complicating the History of Western Translation argue that the ancient Mediterranean was a ‘translational’ society even when, paradoxically, cultures resisted or avoided translation. Indeed, this volume envisions an expansion of the understanding of what translation is, how it works, and how it should be seen as a major cultural force. Chronologically, the papers cover a period that ranges from around the third millennium BCE to the late second century CE; geographically they extend from Egypt to Rome to Britain and beyond. Each paper prompts us to reflect about the problematic nature of translation in the ancient world and challenges monolithic accounts of translation in the West.

Poetry is often understood as a form that resists translation. Translation as Muse questions this truism, arguing for translation as a defining condition of Catullus's poetry and for this aggressively marginal poet's centrality to comprehending cultural transformation in first-century Rome. Young approaches translation from several different angles including the translation of texts, the translation of genres, and translatio in the form of the pan-Mediterranean transport of people, goods, and poems. Throughout, she contextualizes Catullus's corpus within the cultural foment of Rome's first-century imperial expansion, viewing his work as emerging from the massive geopolitical shifts that marked the era. Young proposes that reading Catullus through a translation framework offers a number of significant rewards: it illuminates major trends in late Republican culture, it reconfigures our understanding of translation history, and it calls into question some basic assumptions about lyric poetry, the genre most closely associated with Catullus's eclectic oeuvre.

This book has a twofold purpose. First, it seeks to define the place of vernacular translation within the systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages. Secondly, it examines the way that rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages define their status in relation to each other as critical practices. --introd.