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Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods explores retranslation from a variety of aspects and reflects methodological and theoretical developments in the field. Featuring eleven chapters, each offering a unique approach, the book presents a well-rounded analysis of contemporary issues in retranslation. It brings together case studies and examples from a range of contexts including France, the UK, Spain, the US, Brazil, Greece, Poland, modern Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire. The chapters highlight a diversity of cultural settings and illustrate the assumptions and epistemologies underlying the manifestations of retranslation in various cultures and time periods. The book expressly challenges a Eurocentric view and treats retranslation in all of its complexity by using a variety of methods, including quantitative and statistical analysis, bibliographical studies, reception analysis, film analysis, and musicological, paratextual, textual, and norm analysis. The chapters further show the dominant effect of ideology on macro and micro translation decisions, which comes into sharp relief in the specific context of retranslation.

Retranslation is a phenomenon which gives rise to multiple translations of a particular work. But theoretical engagement with the motivations and outcomes of retranslation often falls short of acknowledging the complex nature of this repetitive process, and reasoning has so far been limited to considerations of progress, updating and challenge; there is even less in the way of empirical study. This book seeks to redress the balance through its case studies on the initial translations and retranslations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Sand's pastoral tale La Mare au diable within the British literary context. What emerges is a detailed exposition of how and why these works have been retold, alongside a critical re-evaluation of existing lines of enquiry into retranslation. A flexible methodology for the study of retranslations is also proposed which draws on Systemic Functional Grammar, narratology, narrative theory and genetic criticism.

Making a contribution to the still under-researched translation history of Verne's Extraordinary Journeys, this book examines the causes of a selection of renderings from French into English of the 1873 Jules Verne novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days). This study integrates a number of methodologies in order to offer a comprehensive explanation of translation outcomes. It presents a diachronic investigation of the multiple interacting translation causes which have produced various retranslations of the same work. A corpus of target texts, from 1873 to 2004, is analysed in order to discover the translation strategies employed and their likely causes using Pym's (1998) model of the four Aristotelian causes of social phenomena, as applied to translation. Translators'biographical details are studied to ascertain the agency of the translator. The book addresses the difficulties encountered in uncovering biographical information on certain translators, and the considerations involved in selecting a suitable corpus of retranslated texts. It provides some understanding of the reasons for which retranslations of a canonical novel are undertaken and contributes to arguments concerning translation universals.