One of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter's notion of “strange loops,” from Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter's strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is.

This book applies frameworks from behavioral economics to Western thinking about translation, mapping four approaches to eight keywords in translation studies to bring together divergent perspectives on the study of translation and interpreting. The volume takes its points of departure from the tensions between the concerns of behavioral and neoclassical economists. The book considers on one side behavioral economists’ interest in the predictable irrationality of “Humans” and its nuances as they unfold in terms of gender, here organized around Masculine Human, Feminine Human, and Queer perspectives, and on the other side neoclassical economists’ chief concerns with the unfailing rationality of the “Econs.” Robinson applies these four approaches across eight chapters, each representing a keyword in the study of translation—agency; difference; Eurocentrism; hermeneutics; language; norms; rhetoric; and world literature—with case studies that problematize the different categories. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive treatment of the behavioral economics of translation and promotes new ways of thinking in the study of translation and interpreting, making it of interest to scholars in the discipline as well as those working along interdisciplinary lines in related fields such as philosophy, literature, and political science.

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks, where does the self come from -- and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"-a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be real-or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

This is a book in the classical Quaestiones genre, like the Tusculanae Quaestiones (“Tusculan questions”) of Cicero (around 45 BCE) and the Quæstiones disputatæ de Veritate (“disputed questions on truth”) of St. Thomas Aquinas (1256-1259). It seeks to ask seven series of questions about key theoretical approaches to the study of translation: three on equivalence theories (semantic equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and deverbalization), three on Descriptive Translation Studies (norms, Toury’s laws, and the translator’s narratoriality), and one on the translator’s visibility. Each “Question” (chapter) charts a circuitous course through past answers to new questions and new answers, drawing especially on the theoretical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and 4EA cognitive science. The book will guide both veteran and novice scholars of translation deep into the complexities besetting the seven keywords.

This book celebrates experimental translation, taking a series of exploratory looks at the hypercyborg translator, the collage translator, the smuggler translator, and the heteronymous translator. The idea isn’t to legislate traditional translations out of existence, or to “win” some kind of literary competition with the source text, but an exuberant participation in literary creativity. Turns out there are other things you can do with a great written work, and there is considerable pleasure to be had from both the doing and the reading of such things. This book will be of interest to literary translation studies researchers, as well as scholars and practitioners of experimental creative writing and avant-garde art, postgraduate translation students and professional (literary) translators.

Avant-Garde Translation is a playful ensemble that celebrates creativity in all things translation by taking you on a journey to the cutting edge of translation practice and theory. Through a refreshing mix of essay forms, from scholarly study to practical translation toolkits, Avant-Garde Translation explores territories as diverse as children’s picturebooks, multilingual poems, and visual artworks, and proposes various translation strategies such as audio-visual collages, ninja invisibility, and collaboration with invented translators. The spirited and provocative contributions intervene in the field of translation studies to shake up the status quo: by highlighting the critical and creative connections between thought and practice, the book shows how literary translation can be an exploratory playground for radical transformation.

This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of translational priming research. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), a module in the brain’s left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their world based on available evidence—and, where no evidence is available, primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming. Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting studies.

This book builds on Marais’s innovative A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation to explore the implications of this conceptualization of translation as the semiotic work from which social-cultural reality emerges and chart the way forward for applications in empirical research. The volume brings together some of the latest developments in biosemiotics, social semiotics and Peircean semiotics with emergent work in translation studies towards better understanding the emergence of trajectories in society-culture through semiotic processes. The book further develops lines of thinking around thermodynamics in the work of Terrence Deacon to consider the ways in which ideas emerge from matter, creating meaning, and its opposites, namely the ways in which ideas constrain matter. Marais links these theoretical strands to empirical case studies in the final three chapters towards operationalizing these concepts for further empirical work. This book is aimed at academics in the fields of translation studies, semiotics, multimodal/multimedial studies, cultural studies and development studies. It will also be applicable to postgraduate students in these fields.

Inspiring translators by making specific experimental writing strategies available to them, this book reimagines experimental translation through close readings of Finnegans Wake. Robinson’s engagement with translational aspects of Finnegans Wake provides rich and useful insights into experimental translation that encourage new approaches to translation theory and practice. The author analyses Joyce’s serial homophonic translations, portmanteau words, and heteronyms along translational lines (following Fritz Senn, Clive Hart, Patrick O’Neill, and others), and offers a showcase translation of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” using all three experimental techniques borrowed from the Wake. The book will be a valuable addition to any postgraduate course in translation theory, literary theory, and Joycean literature. Translation scholars, students, and researchers will find this text a compelling read.

What can Finland’s greatest and supposedly least translatable novel tell us about translation and world literature?