Translation entails transfer of meaning, even if the exact sense of the word "meaning" is vague. The same applies to the term "translation equivalence". Illustrated by numerous examples, this book is an attempt to cope with this and many other conceptual, terminological and practical difficulties resulting from this nebula of issues.

The book comprises a selection of 14 papers concerning the general theme of cultural conceptualizations in communication and translation, as well as in various applications of language.Ten papers in first part Translation and Culture cover the topics of a cognitive approach to conceptualizations of Source Language – versus Target Language – texts in translation, derived from general language, media texts, and literature.The second part Applied Cultural Models comprises four papers discussing cultural conceptualizations of language in the educational context, particularly of Foreign Language Teaching, in online communication and communication in deaf communities.

In 1143 Robert of Ketton produced the first Latin translation of the Qur’an. This translation, extant in 24 manuscripts, was one of the main ways in which Latin European readers had access to the Muslim holy book. Yet it was not the only means of transmission of Quranic stories and concepts to the Latin world: there were other medieval translations into Latin of the Qur’an and of Christian polemical texts composed in Arabic which transmitted elements of the Qur’an (often in a polemical mode). The essays in this volume examine the range of medieval Latin transmission of the Qur’an and reaction to the Qur’an by concentrating on the manuscript traditions of medieval Qur’an translations and anti-Islamic polemics in Latin. We see how the Arabic text was transmitted and studied in Medieval Europe. We examine the strategies of translators who struggled to find a proper vocabulary and syntax to render Quranic terms into Latin, at times showing miscomprehensions of the text or willful distortions for polemical purposes. These translations and interpretations by Latin authors working primarily in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain were the main sources of information about Islam for European scholars until well into the sixteenth century, when they were printed, reused and commented. This volume presents a key assessment of a crucial chapter in European understandings of Islam.

Book of Abstracts for Między tekstem a kulturą z zagadnień przekładoznawstwa, the first volume of Beyond Language (BL1). Między tekstem a kulturą opens the door to translation theory in the Polish perspective, its practice and applications in history and modern times, inviting discussion from the most eminent Polish scholars across the disciplines. Arranged in four major parts (1. Translation theory in historical perspective; 2. Religion in translation – historical and modern perspectives; 3. From theory to practice; 4. Applications), the material will be of interest to both academics researching translation as a discipline and translators practicing the craft.

One of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter's notion of “strange loops,” from Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter's strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is.

When you use a metonymy to say “I’ve got a new set of wheels,” why do you refer to a car by means of the wheels rather any other part? Most cognitive linguist would agree that we prefer to talk about parts that are somehow salient, yet the seemingly simple notion of salience is entangled in a number of intricate problems related to how we understand and talk about the surrounding reality. Adopting the theoretic framework of Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, this volume studies deep and general cognitive factors governing salience effects that influence the ways we use conceptual metonymies in phonic and sign languages.