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This book explores the concept of space, or rather spaces, in relation to translation, to construct a conceptual framework for research to better understand and solve translation problems. A number of interrelated spatial perspectives on translation supported by empirical evidence are presented to help better understand the complexities between China and West in cultural exchanges and to offer a way of explaining what happens to translation and why it takes on a particular form. In the chequered history of Chinese-Western cultural exchange, effective communication has remained a great challenge exacerbated by the ultimate inescapability of linguistic and cultural incommensurability. It is therefore necessary to develop conceptual tools that can help shed light on the interactive association between performativity and space in translation. Despite the unfailing desire to connect with the world, transnational resistance is still underway in China. Further attempts are required to promote a convergence of Chinese and Western translation theories in general and to confront problems arising from translation practice in particular. This work will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies around the world, as well as those working in cultural studies and cross-cultural communication studies.

This book, adopting the perspective of cross-cultural communication, theoretically justifies and addresses human variational translation practice for the first time in the area of translation studies, focusing on the adaptation techniques and variational translation methods, as well as general features and laws of the variational translation process. It classifies and summarizes seven main adaptation techniques and eleven translation methods applicable to all variational translation activities. These techniques and methods, quite different from those used in complete translation or full translation, are systematically studied together with examples, allowing readers to not only understand their interrelations and differences within the context of variational translation methods, but also to master them in order to improve their translation efficacy and efficiency. Readers will gain a better understanding of how variational translation is produced, and of its important role in advancing cross-cultural communication and in reconstructing human knowledge and culture. This book is intended for translation scholars, translation practitioners, students, and others whose work involves the theory and practice of translation and who want to enhance their translation proficiency in cross-cultural communication for the Information Age.

Chinese and English are the world's largest languages, and the number of interpreter-mediated interactions involving Chinese and English speakers has increased exponentially over the last 30 years. This book presents and describes examples of Chinese–English interpreting across a large number of settings: conference interpreting; diplomatic interpreting; media interpreting; business interpreting; police, legal and court interpreting; and healthcare interpreting. Interpreters working in these fields face not only the challenge of providing optimal inter-lingual transfer, but also need to fully understand the discourse-pragmatic conventions of both Chinese and English speakers. This innovative book provides an overview of established and contemporary frameworks of intercultural communication and applies these to a large sample of Chinese–English interpreted interactions. The authors introduce the Inter-Culturality Framework as a descriptive tool to identify and describe the strategies and footings that interpreters adopt. This book contains findings from detailed data with Chinese–English interpreters as experts not only in inter-lingual exchange, but cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. As such, it is a detailed and authoritative guide for trainees as well as practising Chinese–English interpreters.

L'interculturel étant constitutif du culturel, et la traduction fonctionnant comme un outil de médiation entre les cultures, il semble indispensable d'étudier les liens entre l'un et l'autre. La figure qui est au cœur des études traductologiques est celle de l'Autre, et le traducteur doit trouver le juste équilibre entre identité et altérité, mais aussi entre dénotation et connotation(s), entre explicite et implicite, entre littérature et culture. Pour mener à bien cette « négociation » (Umberto Eco), il lui faut tenir compte d'éléments aussi variés que le différentiel cognitif entre les lecteurs de l'original et ceux de la traduction, la variabilité des connotations culturelles de certains termes et les éthé discursifs mobilisés dans le texte à traduire.

This volume invites the reader to participate in a discussion about how to conceptualize the mediation of difference in localities of diversity and transcultural spaces via the analytical lenses of ‘translation'as a social practice. The contributions to the volume explore, discuss, and theorize ‘translation'as a pre-institutionalized strategy of conflict resolution and conflict transformation as well as a driving force of cultural and social change and as a means of knowledge production. In addition to mistranslations and untranslatabilities, the authors analyze the politics of literary translation and translation as research-creation. Contributors: Alex Demeulenaere (Trier), Stefan Dixius (Trier), Jean Friesen (Winnipeg), Ute Heidmann (Lausanne), Julia Charlotte Kersting (Saarbrücken), Judith Lamberty (Saarbrücken), Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier), Laurence McFalls (Montréal), Geneviève Robichaud (Montréal), Robert Schwartzwald (Montréal), Madeleine Stratford (Gatineau).

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the eleventh century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions. Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shonagon so eloquently relates. Featuring reflections on royal and religious ceremonies, nature, conversation, poetry, and many other subjects, The Pillow Book is an intimate look at the experiences and outlook of the Heian upper class, further enriched by Ivan Morris's extensive notes and critical contextualization.

This volume gathers a wide range of voices in Translation Studies offering theoretical insights and practical ideas on how to tackle the cultural dimension in translation pedagogy. Issues range from curriculum planning to evaluation methods. The volume illustrates that the practice of ‘translating culture'in the classroom goes beyond the translation of so-called realia. It also promotes the notion that translation teachers should foster transcultural awareness among their students, whereby intercultural differences and similarities may be negotiated and transcended in the act of translation.

Translating the Female Self across Cultures examines contemporary autobiographical narratives and their Italian and French translations. The comparative analyses of the texts are underpinned by the latest developments in Translation Studies that place emphasis on identity construction in translation and the role of translation in moulding various types of identity. They focus on how the writers'textual personae make sense of their sexual, artistic and post-colonial identities in relation to the mother and how the mother-daughter dyad survives translation into the Italian and French social, political and cultural contexts. The book shows how each target text activates different cultural literary, linguistic and rhetorical frames of reference which cast light on the facets of the protagonists'quest for identity: the cult of the Madonna; humour and irony; gender and class; mimesis and storytelling; performativity and geographical sense of self. The book highlights the fruitfulness of studying women's narratives and their translations, and the polyphonic dialogue between the translations and the literary and theoretical productions of the French and Italian cultures.

Exorcising Translation, a new volume in Bloomsbury's Literatures, Cultures, Translation series, makes critical contributions to translation as well as to comparative and postcolonial literary studies. The hot-button issue of Eurocentrism in translation studies has roiled the discipline in the past few years, with critiques followed by defenses and defenses followed by enhanced critiques. Douglas Robinson identifies Eurocentrism in translation studies as what Sakai Naoki calls a “civilizational spell.” Exorcising Translation tracks two translation histories. In the first, moving from Friedrich Nietzsche to Harold Bloom, we find ourselves caught, trapped, cursed, haunted by the spell. In the second, focused on English translations and translators of Chinese literature, Robinson explores accusations against American translators not only for their inadequate (or even totally absent) knowledge of Chinese and Daoism, but for their Americanness, their trappedness in individualistic and secular Western thought. A closer look at that history shows that Western thought and Chinese thought are mutually shaped in fascinating ways. Exorcising Translation presents a major re-envisioning of translation studies, and indeed the literary relationship between East and West, by a pioneering scholar in the field.

This book focuses on the cross-cultural advertising communication and aesthetic issues of brands and brand slogans. Based on the pragmatic translating theories and case studies of a few classic brand translations, the book puts forward the Three Aesthetic Principles of translating brands. The book special features the cultural in addition to the business aspect of introducing China Time-honored Brands to foreign markets. Readers will learn about the great importance of the aesthetic issues and cultural communications in translating brands and brand slogans through this book.

The Makura no Sôshi, or The Pillow Book as it is generally known in English, is a collection of personal reflections and anecdotes about life in the Japanese royal court composed around the turn of the eleventh century by a woman known as Sei Shônagon. Its opening section, which begins haru wa akebono, or “spring, dawn,” is arguably the single most famous passage in Japanese literature. Throughout its long life, The Pillow Book has been translated countless times. It has captured the European imagination with its lyrical style, compelling images and the striking personal voice of its author. Worlding Sei Shônagon guides the reader through the remarkable translation history of The Pillow Book in the West, gathering almost fifty translations of the “spring, dawn” passage, which span one-hundred-and-thirty-five years and sixteen languages. Many of the translations are made readily available for the first time in this study. The versions collected in Worlding Sei Shônagon are an enlightening example of the many ways in which translations can differ from their source text, undermining the idea of translation as the straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another, one culture to another. By tracing the often convoluted trajectory through which a once wholly foreign literary work becomes domesticated—or resists domestication—this compilation also exposes the various historical, ideological or other forces that inevitably shape our experience of literature, for better or for worse.