Translation often proceeds as if languages already existed, as if the task of the translator were to make an appropriate selection from available resources. Clive Scott challenges this tacit assumption. If the translator is to do justice to himself/herself as a reader, if the translator is to become the creative writer of his/her reading, then the language of translation must be equal to the translators perceptual experience of, and bodily responses to, source texts. Each renewal of perceptual and physiological contact with a text involves a renewal of the ways we think language and use our expressive faculties (listening, speaking, writing). Phenomenology and particularly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty underpins this new approach to translation. The task of the translator is tirelessly to develop new translational languages, ever to move beyond the bilingual into the multilingual, and always to remember that language is as much an active instrument of perception as an object of perception. Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.

While reading transforms texts through memories, associations and re-imaginings, translation allows us to act out our reading experience, inscribe it in a new text, and engage in a dialogic and dynamic relationship with the original. In this highly original new study, Clive Scott reveals the existential and ecological values that literary translation can embody in its perceptual transformation of texts. The transfer of a text from one language into another is merely the platform from which translation launches its larger ambitions, including the existential expansion and re-situation of text towards new expressive futures and ways of inhabiting the world. Recasting language as a living organism and as part of humanity's ongoing duration, this study uncovers its tireless capacity to cross perceptual boundaries, to multiply relations between the human and the non-human and to engage with forms of language which evoke unfamiliar modes of psycho-perception and eco-modelling.

After the many interdisciplinary perspectives on nonverbal communication offered by the author in his previous seven John Benjamins books, which have generated a wide range of scholarly applications, the present monograph is dominated by a very broad concept of translation. This treatment of translation includes theater and cinema (enriching our intellectual-sensorial experience of both 'reading act' and 'viewing act') and offers among other topics: sensorial-intellectual-emotional pre- and post-reading interactions with books; mute or audible 'oralization' of texts; the translator's linguistic and nonverbal-cultural fluency and implicit textual paralanguage and kinesics; translating functions of pictorial illustrations; the blind's text and film perception; the foreign reader's cultural background and circumstances; theater and cinema spectators' total sensory-intellectual experience of plays and films beyond staging or projection; the multiple interrelationships between cinema and theater performers, spectators and their environments, of special interest to all those involved in the theater; and the translator's challenging textual perception of sounds and movements. Over 800 literary quotations, and two virtually exhaustive English inventories of sound- and movement-denoting words with many examples, offer serious students of translation, language or literature a rich reference and drill source.

"This book sets out to establish the state of the art of screen translation and at the same time to underscore the work of scholars following new paths of investigation both in terms of innovative linguistic mediations being examined and pioneering experimental design." "The volume includes descriptions of sophisticated electronic databases and corpora of audiovisual products for the big and small screen, and the rationale behind them. Furthermore, Between Text and Image also includes a number of cutting edge studies in audience perception of audiovisual products." "Finally, the volume does not fail to ignore examples of original research carried out from both a traditional linguistic viewpoint and from a more cultural perspective."--P. [4] de la couv.

This book offers insights into the translation and adaptation of illustrated texts in an era in which visual texts are perceived as a dominant perceptual frame for interpreting social and cultural phenomena. Using source texts including illustrated books, comics, graphic novels and animated films, the authors analyze their translations and adaptations to address the works as multimodal entities, in which even the replacement of one component affects the entire whole. Interviews with the artists - writers, illustrators and animators - will shed more light on the observations. This volume’s unique focus on the visual mode and the impact of its replacement on the multimodal whole is a topic that has not attracted as much attention as the translation of the verbal component, and will appeal to students and researchers of translation and adaptation, popular culture, media and communication, and children’s literature alike.