Translating The World

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

As the discipline of anthropology continues to chart a course along various turns (ontological, ethical, and otherwise), in this pathbreaking volume Carlo Severi and William Hanks return to the question of knowledge and translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology. Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Others have argued that, in purely abstract terms, translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. This collected volume suggests that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation of incommensurable paradigms, or worlds, may be the most""fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. With contributions on topics that range from the philosophical to the ethnographic (with refelctions on themes as diverse as tourism in New Guinea, shamanism in the Amazon, the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, and oral traditions in the Himalayas), this volume provides a new anthropological way to define translation, not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological principle. "

Translation and World Literature offers a variety of international perspectives on the complex role of translation in the dissemination of literatures around the world. Eleven chapters written by multilingual scholars explore issues and themes as diverse as the geopolitics of translation, cosmopolitanism, changing media environments and transdisciplinarity. This book locates translation firmly within current debates about the transcultural movements of texts and challenges the hegemony of English in world literature. Translation and World Literature is an indispensable resource for students and scholars working in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature and world literature.

Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

This volume of 'Angles on the English-Speaking World' discusses the intriguing inter-relatedness between the concepts and phenomena of world literature and translation. The term 'worlding', presented by Ástráður Eysteinsson in this collection, is coined by Sarah Lawell in her book Reading World Literature (1994) where it denotes the reader's pleasurable 'reading' of the meeting of 'worlds' in a literary translation -- i.e. the meeting of the different cultural environments embodied in a translation from one language into another. Through such reading, the reader in fact participates in creating true 'world literature'. This is a somewhat unorthodox conception of world literature, conventionally defined as 'great literature' shelved in a majestic, canonical library. In the opening article sparking off the theme of this collection, Eysteinsson asks: "Which text does the concept of world literature refer to? It can hardly allude exclusively to the original, which the majority of the work's readers may never get to know. On the other hand, it hardly refers to the various translations as seen apart from the original. It seems to have a crucial bearing on the border between the two, and on the very idea that the work merits the move across this linguistic and cultural border, to reside in more than two languages". Picking up on this question at issue, all the essays in this collection throw light on the problematic mechanics of cultural encounters when 'reading the world' in literary translation, i.e. in the texts themselves as well as in the ways in which they have become institutionalised as 'world literature'.

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

The global reception of Samuel Beckett raises numerous questions: in which areas of the world was Beckett first translated? Why were Beckett texts sometimes slow to penetrate certain cultures? How were national literatures impacted by Beckett's oeuvre? Translating Samuel Beckett around the World brings together leading researchers in Beckett studies to discuss these questions and explore the fate of Beckett in their own societies and national languages. The current text provides ample coverage of the presence of Beckett in geographical contexts normally ignored by literary criticism, and reveals unknown aspects of the 1969 Nobel Prize winner interacting with translators of his work in a number of different countries.

This international and interdisciplinary volume explores the relations between translation, migration, and memory. It brings together humanities researchers from a range of disciplines including history, museum studies, memory studies, translation studies, and literary, cultural, and media studies to examine memory and migration through the interconnecting lens of translation. The innovatory perspective adopted by Translating Worlds understands translation’s explanatory reach as extending beyond the comprehension of one language by another to encompass those complex and multi-layered processes of parsing by means of which the unfamiliar and the familiar, the old home and the new are brought into conversation and connection. Themes discussed include: How memories of lost homes act as aids or hindrances to homemaking in new worlds. How cultural memories are translated in new cultural contexts. Migration, affect, memory, and translation. Migration, language, and transcultural memory. Migration, traumatic memory, and translation.

Literature is often assumed to be monolingual: publishing rights are sold on the basis of linguistic territories and translated books are assumed to move from one “original” language to another. Yet a wide range of contemporary literary works mix and meld two or more languages, incorporating translation into their composition. How are these multilingual works translated, and what are the cultural and political implications of doing so? In Literature in Motion, Ellen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential to resist conventions of form and dominant narratives about language and gender. Examining the connection between translation and multilingualism in contemporary literature, she considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation. Jones argues that translation does not conflict with multilingual writing’s subversive potential. Instead, we can understand multilingualism and translation as closely intertwined creative strategies through which other forms of textual and conceptual hybridity, fluidity, and disruption are explored. Jones addresses both well-known and understudied writers from across the American hemisphere who explore the spaces between languages as well as genders, genres, and textual versions, reading their work alongside their translations. She focuses on U.S. Latinx authors Susana Chávez-Silverman, Junot Díaz, and Giannina Braschi, who write in different forms of “Spanglish,” as well as the Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno, who combines Portuguese and Spanish, or “Portunhol,” with the indigenous language Guarani, and whose writing is rendered into “Frenglish” by Canadian translator Erín Moure.