TOPICS IN TRANSLATION 34 Series Editors: Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick and Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A Companion to Translation Studies
Edited by Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Companion to Translation Studies/Edited by Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau. Topics in Translation: 34 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Translating and interpreting. I. Kuhiwczak, Piotr. II. Littau, Karin P306.C655 2007 418 .02–dc22 2006031783
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Typeset by Wordworks Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd. Contents
Notes on Contributors ...... vii
Introduction Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau ...... 1
1 Culture and Translation Susan Bassnett ...... 13
2 Philosophy and Translation Anthony Pym ...... 24
3 Linguistics and Translation Gunilla Anderman ...... 45
4 History and Translation Lynne Long ...... 63
5 Literary Translation Theo Hermans ...... 77
6 Gender and Translation Luise von Flotow ...... 92
7 Theatre and Opera Translation Mary Snell-Hornby ...... 106
8 Screen Translation Eithne O'Connell ...... 120
9 Politics and Translation Christina Schaffner ...... 134
Bibliography ...... 148
Index ...... 177 Notes on Contributors
Gunilla Anderman is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. Her research interests include translation theory, drama trans- lation and the translation of children s literature. She is the author of Europe on Stage: Translation and Theatre (2005), and co-editor with Margaret Rogers of Words, Words, Words: The Translator and the Language Learner (1996), Word, Text, Translation: Liber Amicorum for Peter Newmark (1999), Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives (2003), and In and Out of English: For Better, For Worse (2005). Susan Bassnett is Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University, UK. She is the author of over 20 books, including Translation Studies (3rd edn, 2002) which first appeared in 1980, and Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993) which has been translated into several languages. Her more recent books include Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry (2004), Constructing Cultures (1998) written with Andre Lefevere, and Post-Colonial Translation (1999) co-edited with Harish Trivedi. Luise von Flotow is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include gender and other cultural issues in translation, audiovisual translation, translation and cultural diplomacy, and literary translation. She is the author of Translation and Gender: Translating in the Era of Feminism (1997), co-editor of The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2001), and co-editor and translator of the anthology The Third Shore: Women's Fiction from East Central Europe (2006). Theo Hermans is Professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature at University College, London (UCL), and Director of the Centre for Intercultural Studies. He has published extensively on translation theory and history, and on Dutch and comparative literature, and his work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Spanish and Turkish. He is the author of Translation in Systems (1999) and, amongst other books, editor of the seminal volume The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary
vi viii A Companion to Translation Studies
Translation (1985), Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Transla- tion Studies II (2002) and Translating Others (2006). Piotr Kuhiwczak is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He has published extensively in the fields of comparative literature, cultural studies and translation studies, and is currently researching the impact of translation on Holocaust memoirs and testimonies. His book Successful Polish–English Translation: Tricks of the Trade published in 1994, is now in its third edition. He is on the Advisory Board of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and the Editorial Board of The Linguist, a journal published by the Institute of Linguists. Karin Littau is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Centre for Film Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She has published widely on translation, rewriting and adaptation; and is espe- cially interested in the intermedial relations between literature and film, and the historical receptions of print and new media. She is the author of Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (2006), and co-editor of a special issue on 'Inventions: Literature and Science' for Comparative Critical Studies (2005). Since 1998 she has been on the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). Lynne Long is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, and Director of the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published on Bible translation and on translation history, and is the author of Translating The Bible: From the 7th to the 17th Century (2001), and editor of Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? (2005). She is involved with American Bible Society projects, with the Arts and Humanities Research programme 'Translation and Translation Theories East and West' at the Centre for Asian and African Literatures. She is also a member of the ACUME European Research Project in Cultural Memory based in Bologna. Eithne O'Connell is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland. Her professional qualifications include the Final Translators' Examination (Institute of Linguistics) and a Certificate in Teletext Subtitling from the S4C /Univer- sity of Wales. In 2000, she completed her doctoral research on screen trans- lation at DCU. She is the author of Minority Language Dubbing for Children (2003), and a founder member of both the Irish Translators' and Inter- preters' Association, and the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation. Notes on Contributors ix
Anthony Pym is Director of Postgraduate Programs in Translation at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. He works on sociological approaches to translation and intercultural relations. His recent publica- tions include Pour une ethique du traducteur (1997), Method in Translation History (1998), Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (2000), and The Moving Text: Localisation, Distribution, and Translation (2004). He is also the editor of L'Internationalite litteraire (1988) and Mites australians (1990) and the co-editor of Les formations en traduction et interpretation: Essai de recensement mondial (1995) and Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting (2006). Christina Schaffner is Reader in German and Translation Studies, and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She has published numerous articles on text linguistics and critical discourse analysis, especially of political texts. She is the author of Transla- tion Research and Interpreting Research (2004) and co-author with Uwe Wiesemann of Annotated Texts for Translation: English–German: Functionalist Approaches Illustrated (2001). She has edited numerous books: most recently, Translation and the Global Village (2000), The Role of Discourse Analysis for Translation and Translator Training (2002) and Translation Research and Inter- preting Research (2004). Mary Snell-Hornby taught at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg and Zurich, before taking up a professorship at the University of Vienna. She is also Honorary Professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University, UK. She is the author of more than 100 essays, and has published numerous books on translation studies (as well as on lexicography, linguistics and literary studies), including the influential Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach (1988, 1995). Her most recent book is The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints (2006). She was a founding member of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX).
Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the contributors of this volume for their patience in seeing this project through, and express their gratitude to Tommi Grover at Multilingual Matter for his unfailing support. Finally, we would like to thank the series' editors Susan Bassnett and Edwin Gentzler for asking us to put together this volume. Introduction
PIOTR KUHIWCZAK AND KARIN LITTAU
In his introduction to the revised edition of Contemporary Translation Theory (2001) Edwin Gentzler wrote:
Ironically, when it was first published, this book was initially criticised for including too many theories; many scholars in the field felt that the proliferation in theory was a passing phenomenon. Today, the book may appear to be theoretically limited, covering, as it does, a mere five approaches. As the field continues to grow with new scholars from different countries and different linguistic and cultural traditions conducting research, additional theories will begin to emerge, further complicating the map. (Gentzler, 1993/2001: x)
Gentzler s book, which first appeared in 1993, was written at a time when theorising about translation was changing fast. A fruitful exchange of views on what translation was and how it could, or should, be theorised and studied had taken place during the 1980s and early 1990s. Much of this debate had come in the aftermath of the explosion of theory in the human sciences (see Bergonzi, 1990; Kreiswirth Cheetham, 1990; Krieger, 1994). Susan Bassnett s Translation Studies (1980) was written in the midst of these critical upheavals, which questioned the traditional boundaries by which disciplines had been divided in the academy since the 19th century. It was published as part of the New Accents series for Methuen (later Routledge). The series general editor, Terence Hawkes, claimed in the preface that each of its volumes was to suggest the distinctive discourse of the future (in Bassnett, 1980: x). Thus, while Bassnett s book had laid important ground- work for the discipline of translation studies as a discipline, Gentzler s book by contrast was already looking back to systematise the knowledges belonging to this new discipline. While both books were written in English, the upsurge in the academic interest in translation, of which the revised editions of both titles are an indicator, is by no means restricted to an Anglo-American context. The innovative thinking, which has characterised translation studies from its
1 2 A Companion to Translation Studies very inception, has come from several geographical directions simulta- neously, as well as from diverse critical traditions. When the European Society for Translation Studies was formed in Vienna in 1992, multi-national links were being forged between scholars. Soon, a new wave of new transla- tion studies periodicals was to emerge: Perspectives: Studies in Translatology in Copenhagen, The Translator in Manchester, Translation and Literature in Edinburgh, Across Languages and Cultures in Budapest, Forum in Paris and Seoul, and Przekladaniec in Krakow. This is only an indicative list, and does not include the countless on-line journals that also sprang up in the 1990s. In addition, well-established literary and linguistic journals, which had not shown much interest in translation before, began putting together special editions devoted to translation. For instance, the British journal Forum for Modern Language Studies (1997) devoted a whole issue to translation, as did the Italian journal of English Studies Textus (1999). There was also what can only be described as frantic activity on the conference front. While in the 1980s each translation conference, held mainly in Europe or Canada, had constituted a major event that attracted often hundreds of participants, the 1990s saw an increase in conferences and seminars on such a scale that it was difficult to keep up with participation. But it is not only that the number of events increased dramatically; the events that traditionally had been located in Western Europe and North America were now common in Asia, the former Eastern Europe and South America. This internationalism signalled that translation studies had finally arrived . While its status as a discipline was less and less in question, the sheer proliferation of discourses on translation made it necessary to take stock of that discipline. Thus, dictionaries, encyclopedias and anthologies began to appear with an astonishing frequency in an attempt to guide, but also channel, the reading in the field. Just as anthologists in the 18th and 19th centuries – faced with the multiplication of print in an ever-increasing literary marketplace – selected what they thought was worthy of reading, so editors in translation studies chose key texts for their readerships. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s John Biguenet s and Rainer Schulte s (1985, 1989) anthology, together with Andrew Chesterman s (1989), served as the two basic standard teaching texts in English. Since then, Lawrence Venuti