Although the bridge-building metaphor is undoubtedly a legitimate way of approaching most forms of mediation, there is increasing evidence in the literature that this is not always the case. The scenario in which mediation operates is much more complex and it is one in which mediators’ compliance or resistance to contextual and socio-cultural factors and prevailing norms in a given point in history play a major role. Attention is increasingly being focussed on the nature of the rewritings they produce and on how their agency is made manifest. This holds true for rewritings that take place within the same language, across language boundaries and in the growing area of audio-visual translation. In his article on “The Name and Nature of Translator Studies” (Chesterman 2009) and in his interview of Baker in the first issue of Cultus, (Chesterman and Baker 2008), Chesterman draws attention to the central role occupied by the translator both in the workplace and as an object of research and proposes to make use of the term “‘telos’ to denote the personal motivation of translators” (2009:17) as a companion term to the more familiar term “skopos” already used in translation studies to indicate the intended effect of a translation in the target culture. Thus, “telos” serves to investigate the personal goal of a translator within the context of a specific task, a matter closely related to the ethics of the profession. Since translation necessarily involves some kind of active intervention on the part of the translator (Munday 2007), be it conscious or unconscious, whereby events are rewritten and renarrated, and as “translation passes through a continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity” (Benjamin 1996:70), research into translators’ teloi may well shed new light on why and how they translate and may usefully complement current studies on translation behaviour as it emerges from translated texts. Of particular interest in this regard is the broadening of the notion of translation to include other forms of rewriting in which the rewriter’s interventionist role is a central feature. The present volume addresses various forms of translation and rewriting and explores the strategies rewriters use to achieve their goal of rendering the target text accessible to its recipient audience. “Knowing how” to rewrite in English entails developing an awareness of the whys and wherefores of rewriting. Just as knowledge about language leads to awareness of language, which in turn leads to increased efficiency and sensitivity to language, so familiarity with the general principles of translation and rewriting leads to enhanced competence and performance. Excerpted from the Preface

The Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation provides the first comprehensive overview of intralingual translation, or the rewording or rewriting of a text. This Handbook aims to examine intralingual translation from every possible angle. The introduction gives an overview of the theoretical, political, and ideological issues involved and is followed by the first section which investigates intralingual translation from a diachronic perspective covering the modernization of classical texts. Subsequent sections consider different dialects and registers and intralingual translation from one language mode to another, explore concepts such as self-translating, transediting, and the role of copyeditors, and investigate the increasing interest in the role of intralingual translation and second language learning. Final sections examine recent developments in intralingual translation such as the subtitling of speech for the hard-of-hearing, simultaneous Easy Language interpreting, and respeaking in parliamentary debates. By providing an in-depth study on intralingual translation, the Handbook sheds light on other important areas of translation that are often bypassed, including publishing practices, authorship, and ideological constraints. Authored by a range of established and new voices in the field, this is the essential guide to intralingual translation for advanced students and researchers of translation studies.

This volume is a study into the norms that come into play in the translation of European Union legislation. With a focus on expressions of modality, the study adopts a corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies approach to analyse the translation strategies used in a bilingual English/Italian parallel corpus of European Union legislation and identify the most frequent translational patterns. The book outlines the principles at the basis of the multilingual policy at the European Union and provides a detailed outline of the context in which the drafting and translation processes take place as a key to understanding the translational choices. The impact of sometimes contrasting factors such as the conventions of legal drafting at the European Union and those within the target culture, the principle of equal authenticity and the attention to the quality and readability of legislative texts is revealed in the analysis. Evidence in support of the theories concerning translation universals is also found and their implications for EU legal translation are discussed. The results lead to the formulation of several hypotheses as regards the norms governing the translation of EU legislative texts. The book also reflects on the impact that the translational choices have on the development of European Union legal language as an independent variety. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Legal Translation Studies and Linguistics, as well as practising translators.

The relevance of translation has never been greater. The challenges of the 21st century are truly glocal and societies are required to manage diversities like never before. Cultural and linguistic diversities cut across ideological systems, those carefully crafted to uphold prevailing hierarchies of power, making asymmetries inescapable. Translation and interpreting studies have left behind neutrality and have put forward challenging new approaches that provide a starting point for researching translation as a cultural and historical product in a global and asymmetrical world. This book addresses issues arising from the power vested in and arrogated by translation and interpreting either as instruments of change, or as tools to sustain dominant structures. It presents new perspectives and cutting-edge research findings on how asymmetries are fashioned, woven, upheld, experienced, confronted, resisted, and rewritten through and in translation. This volume is useful for scholars looking for tools to raise awareness as to the challenges posed by the pervasiveness of power relations in mediated communication. It will further help practitioners understand how asymmetries shape their experiences when translating and interpreting.

This collection brings together work from Memory Studies and Translation Studies to explore the role of interlingual and intercultural translation for unpacking transcultural memory dynamics, focusing on memories of violent pasts across different literary genres. The book explores the potential of a research agenda that links narrower definitions of translation with broader notions of transfer, transmission, and relocation across temporal and cultural borders, investigating the nuanced theoretical and conceptual dimensions at the intersection of memory and translation. The volume explores memories of violent pasts – legacies of war, genocide, dictatorship, and exile across different genres and media, including testimony, autobiography, novels, and graphic novels. The collection engages in central questions at the interface of Memory Studies and Translation Studies, including whether traumatic historical experiences that resist representation can be translated, what happens when texts that negotiate such memories are translated into other languages and cultures, and what role translation strategies, translators, and agents of translations play in memory across borders. The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in Translation Studies, Memory Studies, and Comparative Literature.

This bestselling coursebook introduces current understanding about culture and provides a model for teaching culture to translators, interpreters and other mediators. The approach is interdisciplinary, with theory from Translation Studies and beyond, while authentic texts and translations illustrate intercultural issues and strategies adopted to overcome them. This new (third) edition has been thoroughly revised to update scholarship and examples and now includes new languages such as Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, and examples from interpreting settings. This edition revisits the chapters based on recent developments in scholarship in intercultural communication, cultural mediation, translation and interpreting. It aims to achieve a more balanced representation of written and spoken communication by giving more attention to interpreting than the previous editions, especially in interactional settings. Enriched with discussion of key recent scholarly contributions, each practical example has been revisited and/ or updated. Complemented with online resources, which may be used by both teachers and students, this is the ideal resource for all students of translation and interpreting, as well as any reader interested in communication across cultural divides. Additional resources are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://routledgetranslationstudiesportal.com/

Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works. Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack. Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.