Thresholds Of Translation

This volume revisits Genette’s definition of the printed book’s liminal devices, or paratexts, as ‘thresholds of interpretation’ by focussing specifically on translations produced in Britain in the early age of print (1473-1660). At a time when translation played a major role in shaping English and Scottish literary culture, paratexts afforded translators and their printers a privileged space in which to advertise their activities, display their social and ideological affiliations, influence literary tastes, and fashion Britain’s representations of the cultural ‘other’. Written by an international team of scholars of translation and material culture, the ten essays in the volume examine the various material shapes, textual forms, and cultural uses of paratexts as markers (and makers) of cultural exchange in early modern Britain. The collection will be of interest to scholars of early modern translation, print, and literary culture, and, more broadly, to those studying the material and cultural aspects of text production and circulation in early modern Europe.

This book investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literatures in translation. Covering English-, French- and Spanish-language texts, the book applies Glissantian relational thinking to the study of translation and literary circulation, challenging core-periphery models in favour of alternative pathways of cultural exchange.

As the 'thresholds' through which readers and viewers access texts, paratexts have already sparked important scholarship in literary theory, digital studies and media studies. Translation and Paratexts explores the relevance of paratexts for translation studies and provides a framework for further research. Writing in three parts, Kathryn Batchelor first offers a critical overview of recent scholarship, and in the second part introduces three original case studies to demonstrate the importance of paratextual theory. Batchelor interrogates English versions of Nietzsche, Chinese editions of Western translation theory, and examples of subtitled drama in the UK, before concluding with a final part outlining a theory of paratextuality for translation research, addressing questions of terminology and methodology. Translation and Paratexts is essential reading for students and researchers in translation studies, interpreting studies and literary translation.

Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of “illiteracy” as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. “Illiteracy,” Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies. This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.–Mexican border. Through a critical examination of the “illiterate” effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.

From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo—this collection of essays shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. This book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation—the telling of a story across media and vice versa—and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book also takes the reader on a worldwide tour, and examines, among other things, the role of Soviet science fiction in North Korea, the ethical uses of Lego Star Wars in a Brazilian context, and the history of Latin translation in children’s literature. Bringing together scholars from more than a dozen countries and language backgrounds, these cross-disciplinary essays focus on regularly overlooked transmediation practices and terminology, such as book cover art, trans-sensory storytelling, écart, enfreakment, foreignizing domestication, and intra-cultural transformation.

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Gennet's work in contemporary literary theory.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

As something that surrounds, extends, and presents a text to the world, the phenomenon of paratext is gaining more and more attention within the discipline of Translation Studies. This edited volume, with contributions by five Nordic scholars, aims to build on that attention by presenting five case studies on paratexts in translations into Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. A special focus lies on the paratextual mechanisms at play when works from different source cultures are translated into a Nordic target context. The translated works under scrutiny belong to genres such as literary novels, non-fiction works, and religious texts, and the paratexts surveyed include footnotes, covers, blurbs, introductions, and literary reviews. The scholars represented in the volume all work in Translation Studies, or at the intersection between Translation Studies and other disciplines.

This collection of essays considers the development and meaning of the iconostasis, the screen used in churches to separate the sanctuary from the nave. The contributors approach the history of the icon screen from a variety of disciplines, including art history, theology, and architecture.