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.

This is a manual of literary translation and as such will be invaluable to students of linguistics, translation, literary theory and cultural studies. Translation plays an important role in increasing understanding among diverse cultures and nations. Literary translations in particular help different cultures reach a compromise. Beginning with the relationship between pragmatics and translation, the book introduces the major areas of linguistic pragmatics – speech acts, presupposition, implicature, deixis and politeness and how they can be applied in the field of translation. It balances theory and application through the examples of Arabic/English translation using a wide range of texts from The Cairo Trilogy by the Noble Literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz’s trilogy has certainly lost much of its meaning in Hutchin et al.’s translation into English. Their translation fails to assess the effectiveness of the source text and to preserve its implied meaning. All these problematic renderings have contributed to the distortion or loss of meaning. The major concern of the study is to examine the pragmatic meanings involved in a literary translation. The attention given to pragmatic facts and principles in the course of translation can enhance the understanding of the text and improve the quality of translation.

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

This Handbook offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of contemporary issues in Literary Translation research through in-depth investigations of actual case studies of particular works, authors or translators. Leading researchers from across the globe discuss best practice, problems, and possibilities in the translation of poetry, novels, memoir and theatre. Divided into three sections, these illuminating analyses also address broad themes including translation style, the author-translator-reader relationship, and relationships between national identity and literary translation. The case studies are drawn from languages and language varieties, such as Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Nigerian English, Russian, Spanish, Scottish English and Turkish. The editors provide thorough introductory and concluding chapters, which highlight the value of case study research, and explore in detail the importance of the theory-practice link. Covering a wide range of topics, perspectives, methods, languages and geographies, this handbook will provide a valuable resource for researchers not only in Translation Studies, but also in the related fields of Linguistics, Languages and Cultural Studies, Stylistics, Comparative Literature or Literary Studies.

Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms. Literary Translation introduces students to the components of the discipline and models the practice. Three concise chapters help to familiarize students with: what motivates the act of translation how to read and critique literary translations how to read for translation. A range of sustained case studies, both from existing sources and the author’s own research, are provided along with a selection of relevant tasks and activities and a detailed glossary. The book is also complemented by a feature entitled ‘How to get started in literary translation’ on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal (http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/). Literary Translation is an essential guidebook for all students of literary translation within advanced undergraduate and postgraduate/graduate programmes in translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages.