Contexts in Translating is designed to help translators understand the varieties of contexts and their importance for understanding a text and reproducing the meaning in another language. The contexts include the historical setting of writing a text, the cultural components that make a text unique, the types of audiences for which the translation is intended, and the most efficient and effective ways of producing a satisfactory representation of the source-language text. The structural levels of language are described, and the principal features of text organization are also explained. In addition, the main features of various books on translation are outlined, and a chapter on basic theories of translation is followed by a selective bibliography.

Failure to consider the contexts of a text is often responsible for the most serious mistakes in translation. Contexts need to be understood as influencing all structural levels of a text: phonological, lexical, grammatical, and historical. This work seeks to assist in understanding contexts.

For many of us, our earliest and most meaningful experiences with literature occur through the medium of a translated children’s book. This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated: what contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.

Translation Studies has recently been searching for connections with Cultural Studies and Sociology. This volume brings together a range of ways in which the disciplines can be related, particularly with respect to research methodologies. The key aspects covered are the agents behind translation, the social histories revealed by translations, the perceived roles and values of translators in social contexts, the hidden power relations structuring publication contexts, and the need to review basic concepts of the way social and cultural systems work. Special importance is placed on Community Interpreting as a field of social complexity, the lessons of which can be applied in many other areas. The volume studies translators and interpreters working in a wide range of contexts, ranging from censorship in East Germany to English translations in Gujarat. Major contributions are made by Agnès Whitfield, Daniel Gagnon, Franz Pöchhacker, Michaela Wolf, Pekka Kujamäki and Rita Kothari, with an extensive introduction on methodology by Anthony Pym.

To most people, translation means making the words of one language understandable in another; but translation in a broader sense-seeing strangeness and incorporating it into one's understanding-is perhaps the earliest task of the human brain. This book illustrates the translation process in less-common contexts: cultural, religious, even the translation of pain. Its original contributions seek to trace human understanding of the self, of the other, and of the stranger by discovering how we bridge gaps within or between semiotic systems. Translation and Ethnography focuses on issues that arise when we attempt to make significant thematic or symbolic elements of one culture meaningful in terms of another. Its chapters cover a wide range of topics, all stressing the interpretive practices that enable the approximation of meaning: the role of differential power, of language and so-called world view, and of translation itself as a metaphor of many contemporary cross-cultural processes. The topics covered here represent a global sample of translation, ranging from Papua New Guinea to South America to Europe. Some of the issues addressed include postcolonial translation/transculturation from the perspective of colonized languages, as in the Mexican Zapatista movement; mis-translations of Amerindian conceptions and practices in the Amazon, illustrating the subversive potential of anthropology as a science of translation; Ethiopian oracles translating divine messages for the interpretation of believers; and dreams and clowns as translation media among the Gamk of Sudan. Anthropologists have long been accustomed to handling translation chains; in this book they open their diaries and show the steps they take toward knowledge. Translation and Ethnography raises issues that will shake up the most obdurate, objectivist translators and stimulate scholars in sociolinguistics, communication, ethnography, and other fields who face the challenges of conveying meaning across human boundaries.

Toward a Science of Translating, first published in 1964, is still very much in demand today. Written by a linguist and anthropologist with forty years of experience in the field of language and religion, this work describes the major components of translating; setting the translating into the context of historical changes in principles and procedures over the last two centuries. With an emphasis on texts being understood within their cultural contexts, one of the reasons for its continuing relevance is the broad number of illustrative examples taken from field experience of translators in America, Africa, Europe and Asia.

This volume represents the first large-scale effort to address topics of translation in Russian contexts across the disciplinary boundaries of Slavic Studies and Translation Studies, thus opening up new perspectives for both fields. Leading scholars from Eastern and Western Europe offer a comprehensive overview of Russian translation history examining a variety of domains, including literature, philosophy and religion. Divided into three parts, this book highlights Russian contributions to translation theory and demonstrates how theoretical perspectives developed within the field help conceptualize relevant problems in cultural context in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia. This transdisciplinary volume is a valuable addition to an under-researched area of translation studies and will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students across the fields of Translation Studies, Slavic Studies, and Russian and Soviet history. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315305356.