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In academic environments ruled by managerialist philosophies, learning as doing, as outcomes, prevails. This work complicates the equation by taking up learning as becoming. Through the prism of learning metaphors, which apart from construction and transmission have not been fully explored in our discipline, especially the potential of Bildung, we seek to make a case that naming an ontological turn helps us orient our priorities, even if the turn is already with us in translation and interpreting in such attributes and practices as affect, voice, creativity, identity, subjectivity, and self-reflection.

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This study seeks a threefold exploration of an aspect of Mark Twain's forays into translation, particularly with respect to one tale's fate in its first French version. First, back-translation's most ostensible purpose is to represent a foreign language text's (in)accuracy transparently; Twain, assuming a persona as a naive mistranslator, humorously reinvents the procedure to disparage a rendering of his work, constituting an act of translation (meta)criticism and producing a work of parody. The study turns to literary back-translation as an emerging horizon of translation "against our teleological conception of translation" (Lane 2020a, 6), and a potential source of creative misprision or misreading. Twain uses literalism, I demonstrate, as a comic strategy to confound sense. I show cases in which Twain indulged in pseudotranslation and free-associational mistranslation often as imaginative perspective-taking. Secondly, I survey the intrigue behind his famous back-translation of the jumping frog tale, including its textual variations, and locate it as a subversion. Thirdly and finally, I perform a comparative reading of representative passages from Twain's story, the 19th-century translation by Theodor Bentzon (actually Marie-Thérèse Blanc), and Twain's vengeful back-translation, in order to reveal patterns of the American writer's translation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Blanket bans against "foreign" ideas often find their battleground at the level of school curricula. The case of HB 2281 in Tucson, Arizona, in 2010 is one such example, as it sought to legally prevent "ethnic solidarity" and "resentment," in the process outlawing from the classroom an array of texts--English, Spanish, Mayan, translanguaged, originals, and translations. Authors and activists, defining themselves as "translators" and smugglers (librotraficantes), rose to a counterhegemonic defense of a multicultural ethos. Their stand against the Tucson ban was and is intended to build cultural and cross-cultural unity, border-crossing unity, and "rehumanization," not the alleged self-marginalizing. The contribution of this study in part is to provide a textual defense, as the resisted works themselves have not been examined for answers as to why these cultural voices were suppressed. Many of the texts thematically are in fact searches for identity amid the tensions. The article also underscores the articulations between multilinguality, translation, and this identitarian right. Finally, it shows how the panethnic, inclusive gesture behind concepts adopted in the Mexican American studies program, such as In Lak'ech, itself a translation of Maya consciousness, demonstrates language's role in building a plural curricular canon, defending it from othering, while exercising the right of critique. [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]

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]