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Copyright of FORUM is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Babel: International Journal of Translation / Revue Internationale de la Traduction / Revista Internacional de Traducción is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of this article is to unite the different strands of postpositivist thinking about translator education, including both axiological and epistemological, as well as the often-neglected political dimensions. Accordingly, the study considers evidence-based versus values-based education, performativity, dialogue, deconstruction, reflexivity, emergentism, border pedagogy, complexity, pluralism, and the enactment of "multiple voices" (González-Davies 2004). Thirteen postmodern notions and their implications for translation pedagogics are surveyed, including ethics, intersubjectivity, shifting classroom power structures, and the dilemma of canon. How are uncertainty and fragmentariness reconciled with the inherent progress-orientedness of the educational project? And significantly, how is postmodern consciousness enacted in classroom practice? In seeking what Torres del Rey (2002, 271) calls a more participatory and reflexive educational context, I entertain postmodern teaching and learning in the discipline as a possible approach to active, flexible, creative, collaborative, and inclusive roles and identities for both facilitators and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectral in translation may be considered an opportunity for opening, and the textual haunting that results, a way of conceiving of other-inhabitedness. Texts, translations, authors and translators have long been framed in the discourse of hauntedness as a way of coming to terms with their complex subjectivities. A hauntological approach to translation allows for an engagement with the presence-in-absence of a 'source,' the translational disjunctures of time and space, the return of the traumatic and the repressed, and the promise of alterity. We posit three potential components of translational spectrality: (1) translation and trauma; (2) haunted texts and readings, including acts of translation; and (3) the spectral author and translator. The figure of the ghost confronts that of the autonomous author, at the same time giving voice to the (dis)embodied translator and attendant invisibilities of their status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is premised on the assertion that poems about translation can offer a way of doing theory, providing a resource that may elude rational discourse and reach the reader at least partly through eliciting aesthetic response. In many cases the poems presented and discussed are well known and broadly resonant; in others, quite obscure 'occasional' poems, but as a whole they show great teachable potential as a set of interrelated cases. Subgenres that poems about translation take, such as the verse epistle and the translator's prefatory poem, are discerned, and ten subtypes of translation themes–such as the translator's identity, translation framing and criticism, apologia for translation, advice to the translator – are distinguished in this non-exhaustive canon, and one may historicise and draw further conclusions about the poems in or against their respective eras of composition. The pedagogical usefulness of these works is strengthened by the analytical attention given to key features of the texts for elucidating principles, thematics, and historical debates on literary translation for the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of self-help often is nurtured – or hijacked – from highbrow literary traditions such as conduct literature and sacred texts. Translation is the mechanism whereby an 'esotouristic' or new-ageified text travels in ready consumability, a commercializing process that asserts forms that themselves are ideological, and dramatically shifts 'mirrors for princes' and works considered 'high literature' to works of mass marketability. The branding of yogic and Kabbalistic texts, and of authors Kahlil Gibran, Baltasar Gracián, Rumi, and Sun Tzu, is analyzed in this light. I object to the 'timeless classic' positioning of texts that deterritorializes, dehistoricizes, and deculturizes, and map these publications as forms of manipulation, especially exoticizing, genre shifting, radical recontextualizing, and allegorizing. The resulting hyper-acceptability of the distorted products for a self-helpified readership calls into question the translator's complicity in appropriative, otherized cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Beat writers' influence on world letters is well known, but far less understood is their translational ethos that brought the world to American writing. This study offers insight into a Beat philosophy of translation, whether formalized or implicit. What emerges is a picture of an expansive poetics that puts translation in the service of a project of identity‐formation that actively chose its confederates and precursors from all over the world's language traditions. For the Beats, translation was sympathy and identification both textual and biographical, sometimes to the point of projection and creative misreading, and always with a sensibility recognizably tied to their place and time, a Beat translation style. They blurred the lines between original and translation like few generations of writers, including through interpolation, "shift linguals," homage, and other kinds of polyphonic textures. While some of its key figures are already understood in their translatorial dimension, considered as a whole, the Beat poets' theories and practices of translation reveal the group to be more multicultural, and more multilingually networked, than perhaps had hitherto been thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the author's experience of a constructed "self" in translation? This question offers us a brief incursion into the problem and the opportunity of being translated, which I plot on a cline from anxiety, uncertainty and loss of self, to renewal. Two arcs on the metaphoric axes are ethereal and carnal, respectively: soul, manifested in such comparisons as translation as metempsychosis, and body, which appears in translation tropes such as war, on the aggressive end, and erotics, on the cooperative. We also see variations such as enslavement and reproduction. These figures form ways of coming to terms with the double authorship of all translation - even self-translation - and of the author's sense of survival as "self" or "other" in the process of inscription in a new language, as well as the author's perception of the translator with respect to his or her identity formation. The primary dichotomy of the translator as collaborator or competitor - that is, the dynamics of coexistence or the tensions of domination - underlies these conceptualizations. Keywords: identity, body, estrangement, metaphors of translation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The 'reprocessed' text, in Paloposki and Koskinen's (2010) term, often eludes critical attention, as it is part of the textual evolution of a work's pre-history. This study takes up the revised translation as process and product for closer examination, particularly in its assertions of authority, and in its uncertain relationship to its ecology of predecessor translations and retranslations. The motivations for revision are explored, as is the sometimes misleading role of peritexts in shaping the identities of the revised translation, and the types of revisers and revision distinguished. This research locates the revised translation as a subgenre at the intersection of the translatorial, the editorial, the adaptational, and the promotional. Finally, the ambiguities and multivocality of multiple authorship are considered, case studies explored, and ways of strengthening attributions and textual identity in this 'palimpsestic' form are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Babel: International Journal of Translation / Revue Internationale de la Traduction / Revista Internacional de Traducción is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This work considers the ways in which human translation and human translators are depicted as interacting with unknown languages in classic works of speculative fiction. The objective is to reveal the range of underlying conceptions entertained about language and consciousness. Some of the philosophies on which these linguistic fictions are built are benign, but some use translation for expansionist ends. Almost all the fictional scenarios posit a colonial encounter, hence the potential interest of these works to translators, especially as they form a vexed image of translating, showing translating to be a primary intercultural contact skill on which political realities, and existential identities characterized by ethnocentricity – or, less commonly, ethno-relativity – depend. Resistances to translation – untranslatabilities – emerge as a common denominator of depictions of otherness, whether for reasons of distance, for thought manipulation or as a defense against cultural appropriation from colonizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to bring educational theory on self-directedness to bear on translator training, and to document ways intentional learning for autonomy are being fostered, or could be. Our project connects to ongoing scholarly efforts toward establishing learner autonomy and empowerment as a priority goal in translator training and education. However, here we also wish to take stock of, and reflect more on, what autonomy means in principle, its connection to student development (intra- and inter-) personally and pre-professionally, self-directed learning's (SDL) relationship to current learning methods, supports and role definitions we can use in our instruction, and the learning behaviors, motivations and outcomes we can expect. In the process, we will examine the extent to which related self-directedness practices now emerging can be integrated into awareness and thus help translation learners advance toward intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the 'expert blind spot', our 'unconscious competence', lead us to undermine the effectiveness of our translation assignments? This study characterizes the translation task as schema-based, and thus prone to cognitive overload for the learner. Accordingly, schema acquisition tasks featuring reduced-goal specificity and goal-free problems for training the novice are reviewed. The argument is put forward that we need 1) to use more scaffolding to reduce cognitive load, 2) to vary task architecture for learning (including the use of planning pre-tasks), and 3) to provide diagnostic help for the student translator to attain context-independence for 'high road transfer'. Formats for expertise modeling are considered - reverse tasks, completion examples, and other whole-task models - as instructional designs for load-managed translation tasks that improve problem-solving, schema acquisition, process-orientation, and metacognitive monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The often-neglected issue of reading - a skill that is inextricable from translation - affects virtually every aspect of a translator trainee's profile, from resourcing skills to background knowledge to linguistic competence itself. How can empirical studies improve the teaching of the act of reading for translation? What can we do as educators to see that novices situate the text in the world, what I call world-involvement? What are the implications of students' changing reading patterns and habits for translator training and education, particularly in an age of alternate literacies? How do reading models and their theorization fit with process-orientedness, and with the translator as subject, as negotiator of meaning, as constructively responsive agents of text transfer? Does it make sense to consider reading competence as part of the translator's macrocompetence? This study aims primarily to engage with the research on reading, and with the changing conceptualizations of reading and the reader. A brief array of hermeneutic and textual analysis approaches and tasks that might be integrated in translator training curricula - predicting, schemata activation, metacognitive monitoring, intertextual awareness-raising, and strategic processing - are then outlined, contributing toward a fuller repertoire of tasks and task construction components for strategic reading in translator training. In sum, a transactional view of reading in both non-literary and literary translation environments is proposed, and pedagogical interventions and diagnostics oriented in expertise studies and reading theory are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]