In The Fictions of Translation, emerging and seasoned scholars from a range of cultures bring fresh perspectives to bear on the age-old practice of translation. The current movement of people, knowledge and goods around the world has made intercultural communication both prevalent and indispensable. Consequently, the translator has become a more prominent figure and translation an increasingly present theme in works of literature. Embedding translation in a fictional setting and considering its most extreme forms – pseudotranslation or self-translation, for example – are fruitful ways of conceptualizing the act of translating and extending the boundaries of translation studies. Taken together, the various translational fictions examined in this collection yield new insights into questions of displacement, migration and hybridity, all characteristic of the modern world. The Fictions of Translation will thus be of interest to practising translators, students and scholars of translation and literary studies, as well as a more general readership.

This volume on Transfiction (understood as an aestheticized imagination of translatorial action) recognizes the power of fiction as a vital and pulsating academic resource, and in doing so helps expand the breadth and depth of TS. The book covers a selection of peer-reviewed papers from the 1st International Conference on Fictional Translators and Interpreters in Literature and Film (held at the University of Vienna, Austria in 2011) and links literary and cinematic works of translation fiction to state-of-the-art translation theory and practice. It presents not just a mixed bag of cutting-edge views and perspectives, but great care has been taken to turn it into a well-rounded transficcionario with a fluid dialogue among its 22 chapters. Its investigation of translatorial action in the mirror of fiction (i.e. beyond the cognitive barrier of ‘fact’) and its multiple transdisciplinary trajectories make for thought-provoking readings in TS, comparative literature, as well as foreign language and literature courses.

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Cordasco then breaks down each chapter by subgenre--including science fiction, fantasy, and horror--to guide readers toward the kinds of works that most interest them. Her discussion of available SFT stands alongside an analysis of how various subgenres emerged and developed in a given language. She also examines the reasons a given subgenre has been translated into English. An informative and one-of-a-kind guide, Out of This World offers readers and scholars alike a tour of speculative fiction's new globalized era.

This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

Fiction has always been in a state of transformation and circulation: how does this history of mobility inform the emergence of the novel? The Spread of Novels explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation. Demonstrating that translation was both the cause and means by which the novel attained success, Mary Helen McMurran shows how this period was a watershed in translation history, signaling the end of a premodern system of translation and the advent of modern literary exchange. McMurran illuminates aspects of prose fiction translation history, including the radical revision of fiction's origins from that of cross-cultural transfer to one rooted by nation; the contradictory pressures of the book trade, which relied on translators to energize the market, despite the increasing devaluation of their labor; and the dynamic role played by prose fiction translation in Anglo-French relations across the Channel and in the New World. McMurran examines French and British novels, as well as fiction that circulated in colonial North America, and she considers primary source materials by writers as varied as Frances Brooke, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Françoise Graffigny. The Spread of Novels reassesses the novel's embodiment of modernity and individualism, discloses the novel's surprisingly unmodern characteristics, and recasts the genre's rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, Stranger Fictions offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. Rebecca C. Johnson rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practices—including "bad" translation, mistranslation, and pseudotranslation—Johnson argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. Examining nearly a century of translations published in Beirut, Cairo, Malta, Paris, London, and New York, from Qiat Rūbinun Kurūzī (The story of Robinson Crusoe) in 1835 to pastiched crime stories in early twentieth-century Egyptian magazines, Johnson shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. Stranger Fictions affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one’s own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans’s explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans’s status, in the words of the Washington Post, as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” “On Self-Translation is a beautiful and often profound work. Stavans, a superb stylist, offers erudite meditations on translation, and gives us new ways to think about language itself.” — Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of' “Proper” English, from Shakespeare to South Park “Stavans carries his learning light, and has the gift of communicating the profoundest of insights in the simplest of ways. The book is delightfully free of unnecessary jargon and ponderous discourse, allowing the reader time and space for her own reflections without having to slow down in the reading of it. This is work born out of the deep confidence that complete and dedicated immersion in a chosen field of knowledge (and practice) can bring; it is further infused with original wisdom accrued from self-reflexive, lived experiences of multilinguality.” — Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University