Through close examination of references to gender identity, female sexuality and corporeality, this book is the first of its kind to shed light on the complexities of translating the recent transgressive turn in contemporary women’s writing in French. Via four case studies, namely, the translations into English of Nelly Arcan’s Putain (2001), Catherine Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Nancy Huston’s Infrarouge (2010) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000), this book explores how transgressive topoi such as prostitution, anorexia, matrophobia, rape, female desire, and transgenderism are translated. The book considers how (auto)fictional female selves portrayed are dis/placed by translation at both a textual and paratextual level. Combining feminist phenomenological perspectives on female lived experience with feminist translation theory, this interdisciplinary study offers an insight into how the experiential is brought into language, how it journeys via language into new cultural contexts via translation and creates a dialogical space in which the subjectivities of those involved (author, narrator, protagonist, translator) become open to the porosity of encounters with alterity. The volume will appeal to scholars in translation studies, French Studies, and gender and sexuality studies, particularly those interested in feminist translation and literary translation.

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019.

This collection offers insights into the transnational and translingual implications of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), a text that has served as foundational for feminisms worldwide since its publication in 1949. Little scholarly attention has been devoted to how the original French-language source text made its way into languages other than English. This is a shocking omission, given that many (but by no means all) other translations were based on the 1953 English translation by Howard M. Parshley, which has been widely criticized by Beauvoir scholars for its omissions and careless attention to its philosophical implications. This volume seeks to fill this gap in scholarship with an innovative collection of essays that interrogate the ways that Beauvoir’s essay has shifted in meaning and significance as it has travelled across the globe. This volume brings together for the first time scholars from Translation Studies, Literary Studies and Philosophical Studies, and over half of it is dedicated to non-Western European engagements with Le Deuxième Sexe (including chapters on the Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian and Polish translations). As such, this collection will be essential to any scholar of Beauvoir’s philosophy and its contributions to feminist discourses.

This volume examines strategies for embedding gender awareness within translation studies and translator training programmes. Drawing on a rich collection of theoretically-informed case studies, its authors provide practical advice and examples on implementing gender-inclusive approaches and language strategies in the classroom. It focuses on topics including, how to develop gender-inclusive practices to challenge students’ attitudes and behaviours; whether there are institutional constraints that prevent trainers from implementing non-heteronormative practices in their teaching; and how gender awareness can become an everyday mode of expression. Positioned at the lively interface of gender and translation studies, this work will be of interest to practitioners and scholars from across the fields of linguistics, education, sociology and cultural studies.

Precisely 30 years after the debut of her provocative photo-portraits, this book chronicles the early career of Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat. In its first 20 years, Neshat’s work weaved viewers into complex readings of women and power in Iran. Yet her images also drew criticisms of exoticizing Muslim women, and later video installations were accused of lacking political assertion during stormy relations between the West and the Islamic world. Now broadly recognized as a social justice artist, this volume chronicles Neshat’s evolution from photography to film, from personal to political expression, and expands existing scholarship to investigate underserved contexts for her work, including the cinematic turn and emergent theories of globality in contemporary art. Neshat’s hyphenated identity was often attenuated by reductive and exoticizing discourses; therefore, this volume draws attention to her transnational methodologies, informed by strategies of appropriation, performativity, and embodiment while articulating Persian visual and literary traditions. Complicating simplistic ethnographies, her disruption of neo-Orientalist paradigms and representations has led audiences to reconsider Islamophobic, Islamism, and gender repressions that are political, psychological, and above all cross-cultural. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, photography, cinema studies, performance, transnational and global studies, women’s studies, and Iranian studies.

This book examines how mysticism can tell us about translation and translation can tell us about mysticism, addressing the ancient but ongoing connections between the art of rendering one text in another language and the art of the ineffable. The volume represents the first sustained act of attention to the interdisciplinary crossover of these two fields, taking a Wittgensteinian approach to language, and investigates how mystics and their translators manage to write about what cannot be written about. Three questions are addressed overall: how mysticism can be used to conceptualise translation; the issues that mysticism raises for translation theory and practice; and how mystical texts have been and might be translated. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Translator’s Task’ is considered in detail as a controversial example of dialogue. Translation examples are given in a range of languages, and six major case studies are provided, including a close reading of Exodus and an analysis of a recent radical translation of Lucretius. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in translation studies, mysticism studies, theology and literary translation, as well as practising translators.

This volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world. The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications. This book will be of interest to scholars in Comparative Literature, World Literature, Translation Studies, Italian Studies, Romance Languages, European Studies, Dance, Architecture and Media Studies, as well as to scholars specialised in paratext and reception.

If countercultural literature is meant to "counter" a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? Translating the Counterculture addresses that question by examining the reception of the Beat Generation in Turkey. There, the Beat message of dissent is being given renewed life as publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with the conservative social and political trends in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. Through an examination of a broad range of literary translations, media portrayals, interviews, and other related materials, Translating the Counterculture seeks to uncover how the Beats and their texts are being circulated, discussed, and used in Turkey to rethink the possibilities they might hold for social critique today. By focusing on the ways in which local conditions and particular needs shape reception, Mortenson questions our understanding of the Beats in both popular culture and academic discourse. He examines how in Turkey the Beats have been framed by the label "underground literature"; explores the ways they are repurposed in the counterculture-inspired journal Underground Poetix; looks at the reception of Kerouac's On the Road and how that reaction provides a better understanding of the construction of "American-ness"; delves into the recent obscenity trial of William S. Burroughs's novel The Soft Machine and the attention the book's supporters brought to government repression and Turkish homophobia; and analyzes the various translations of Allen Ginsberg's Howl to demonstrate the relevance Ginsberg still holds for social rebellion today. Translating the Counterculture takes a revolutionary look at how contemporary readers in other parts of the world respond to the Beats. Challenging and unsettling an American-centric understanding of the Beats, Mortenson pushes the discipline toward a fuller consideration of their cultural legacy in a globalized twenty-first century.

Salman Rushdie's writing is engaged with translation in many ways: translator-figures tell and retell stories in his novels, while acts of translation are catalysts for climactic events. Covering his major novels as well as his often-neglected short stories and writing for children, Salman Rushdie and Translation explores the role of translation in Rushdie's work. In this book, Jenni Ramone draws on contemporary translation theory to analyse the part translation plays in Rushdie's appropriation of historical and contemporary Indian narratives of independence and migration.