This book explores literary translation in a variety of contexts. The chapters showcase the research into literary translation in North America, Europe, and Asia. Written by a group of experienced researchers and young academics, the contributors study a variety of languages (including English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Dutch, German, and Swedish), use a wide range of approaches (including quantitative review of literary translations; transfictional approaches to translation; and a review of concepts such as paratexts, intralingual translation, intertextuality, and retranslation), and aim to expand on existing debates on translation and translation studies as a discipline. The chapters aim to provide a panorama of the variety of topics and interests of contemporary translation studies, as well as problematize some of the concepts and approaches that seem to have become the only accepted/acceptable model in some academic quarters. This book was originally published as a special issue of Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.

What comes first in regard to translation theory and translation practice? Do theorists observe what translators do and develop theories based on that? Do translators gain ideas and tools from studying theories? Or does it go both ways? Or is it neither, and translation scholars are completely separated from practising translators? This book explores a selection of ideas from translation theory and explores how they might influence, or be influenced by, the work that translators do.

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation provides an accessible, diverse and extensive overview of literary translation today. This next-generation volume brings together principles, case studies, precepts, histories and process knowledge from practitioners in sixteen different countries. Divided into four parts, the book covers many of literary translation’s most pressing concerns today, from teaching, to theorising, to translation techniques, to new tools and resources. Featuring genre studies, in which graphic novels, crime fiction, and ethnopoetry have pride of place alongside classics and sacred texts, The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation represents a vital resource for students and researchers of both translation studies and comparative literature.

Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries is a collection of articles that gathers together current work in literary translation to show how research in the field can speak to other disciplines such as cultural studies, history, linguistics, literary studies and philosophy, whilst simultaneously learning from them.

Within translation studies books on translating conceptually dense texts, such as philosophical or theoretical writings, are remarkably few. Although the translation of literature has been a favourite topic for many decades, the translation of theories on literature has been neglected. The phrase 'theories of translation' is everywhere, but 'translation of theories' is a rare sight. On the other hand, the term 'translation' has become a commonplace in literary and cultural studies - yet usually as a rhetorical figure describing the fate of those who struggle between two worlds and two languages, such as migrants or women. Not much attention has been paid to the role of 'translation proper' in contemporary circulation of ideas. The book addresses these gaps in translation studies and in literary studies for the first time by examining two specific cases where translation strategies and patterns crucially influenced the reception of imported schools of thought. By examining the importation of structuralism and semiotics into Turkish and of French feminism into English, it invites the readers to think about the impact of translation on the transmission of ideas across linguistic-cultural borders and power differentials. It is, therefore, of particular interest to the scholars working in translation studies, in literary and cultural theory, and in gender studies.

An Overview of Chinese Translation Studies at the Beginning of the 21st Century presents and analyses over 100,000 bibliographic notes contained within a large academic database focusing on translation within China. Exploring Chinese translation studies two decades before and after the year 2000, the book will introduce aspects of theory, culture, strategy, register, genre, and context to the field of translation in China, and will also take into account the impact of technology, education, and research within this field. Aimed at postgraduate students and researchers of translation studies, the focus of An Overview of Chinese Translation Studies at the Beginning of the 21st Century is the theory and practice of translation studies within a fast-paced and growing academic discipline.

Bringing a fuzzy logic-based approach into translation studies and drawing on the theory of information entropy, this book discusses the translation of fuzzy language in literary works and advances a new method of measuring text fuzziness between translation and source text. Based on illustrative examples from the popular novel The Da Vinci Code and its two translated Chinese versions, the study demonstrates the fuzziness measuring method through an algorithmic process. More specifically, information entropy is applied to measure the uncertainty associated with readers’ understanding of the original and its corresponding target texts. The underlying hypothesis is that the probability distribution in which readers will understand identified fuzzy discourse is measurable. By further explicating the validity of the hypothesis, it seeks to solve translational “fuzzy” problems in the translation process and offers an alternative, novel approach to the study of “fuzzy” literary texts and their translation. Hopefully, the argument of the book that the intrinsic uncertainty of fuzzy language can be evaluated through Shannon’s information entropy will open up a new avenue to the quantitative description of the fuzziness of language and translation. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in translation studies, applied linguistics, and literary criticism.

This is the first English translation of Andrei V. Fedorov’s classic 1953 text Vvedenie v teoriiu perevoda / Introduction to Translation Theory. Fedorov was the first to argue that translation theorizing should be based on linguistics, due to the fact that language is the common denominator of all translation. In addition, this text offers a concise but thorough comparative overview of thinking on translation in Western Europe and Russia. The detailed annotations and substantial introduction by the leading scholar and award-winning translator Brian James Baer inscribe Fedorov’s work in the political and cultural context of the Soviet Union, highlighting the early influence of Russian Formalism on Fedorov’s thinking. This volume is a model of scholarly translation that fills a major gap in our understanding of Soviet translation theory, which will compel a rethinking of current histories of the field. Contributing to the important work of internationalizing and generating new histories of translation studies, this volume is key reading for scholars and researchers of the history, theory, and politics of translation studies; comparative literature; and Russian and Slavic studies.

Written by leading experts in the area, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies brings together original contributions representing a culmination of the extensive research to-date within the field of Spanish Translation Studies. The Handbook covers a variety of translation related issues, both theoretical and practical, providing an overview of the field and establishing directions for future research. It starts by looking at the history of translation in Spain, the Americas during the colonial period and Latin America, and then moves on to discuss well-established areas of research such as literary translation and audiovisual translation, at which Spanish researchers have excelled. It also provides state-of-the-art information on new topics such as the interface between translation and humour on the one hand, and the translation of comics on the other. This Handbook is an indispensable resource for postgraduate students and researchers of translation studies.