Introduction: European Translations of Romanticism

This chapter introduces a collective volume entitled Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies. Its point of departure is that translation is in motion. Both translation practice and translation studies have seen considerable innovation in recent decades and, consequently, professional and academic boundaries have shifted and moved. Against this backdrop and departing from various vantage points, the authors and editors of the book take stock of and discuss the moving boundaries of translation (studies). They analyse recent developments in the field, addressing new translation phenomena, new practices and tools, new forms of organisation, new concepts and names as well as new scholarly approaches and methods. Analyses and reflections are offered on the boundaries within the discipline (internal boundaries) as well as those surrounding it (external boundaries); issues of delimitation and boundary struggles are focal points, as is the relationship between translation practice and translation studies. This introductory chapter gives an overview of the contributions to the book, and identifies and discusses key topics and movements foregrounded by the authors. Key movements identified include expanding external boundaries and blurring internal lines as well as scholarly attempts at bridging gaps and crossing borders, real or assumed. Translation is in motion. Both translation practice and translation studies (TS) have seen considerable innovation in recent decades, and we are currently witnessing a wealth of new approaches and concepts, some of which reflect new translation phenomena, whereas others mirror new scholarly foci. Volunteer translation, crowdsourcing, virtual translator networks, transediting and translanguaging are only some examples of practices and notions that are emerging on the scene alongside a renewed focus on well-established concepts that have traditionally been considered peripheral to the practice and study of translation: intralingual and intersemiotic translation are cases in point. At the same time, technological innovation and global developments such as the spread of English as a lingua franca are affecting wide areas of translation and, with them, TS. These trends are currently pushing or even crossing our traditional understandings of translation (studies) and its boundaries. The question is: how to deal with these developments? Some areas of the translation profession seem to respond by widening its borders, adding new practices such as technical writing, localisation, transcreation or post-editing to their job portfolios, whereas others seem to be closing ranks. The same trend can be observed in the academic discipline: some branches of translation studies are eager to embrace all new developments under the TS umbrella, whereas others tend to dismiss (some of) them as irrelevant or as merely reflecting new names for age-old practices. Against this backdrop, contributors to this collective volume were invited to take stock of and discuss the moving boundaries of translation (studies). The chapters in this book therefore analyse recent developments in the field, addressing new translation phenomena, new practices and tools, new forms of organisation, new concepts and names as well as new scholarly approaches and methods. Analyses and reflections are offered on the boundaries within the discipline (internal boundaries) as well as those surrounding it (external boundaries); issues of delimitation and 2boundary struggles are focal points, as is the relationship between translation practice and translation studies. Evidently, one book cannot provide full coverage of all new trends in such a wide and dynamic field as TS, but many are addressed, exhaustively or more briefly, in the chapters of the present volume.

Daniel Simeoni’s call for an actor-based complement to the concept of norms in Translation Studies and its subsequent introduction of the habitus concept has revealed groundbreaking. Among other things, Translation Studies has benefited from using habitus as a conceptual tool to comprehend the translator/interpreter as a professional. However, as already pointed out by Simeoni 1998, a translator’s habitus cannot be reduced to his/her professional expertise as a translator. The present essay takes this observation a step further and argues that a translator’s plural and dynamic habitus (Lahire, 2004) also stands for a socialized individual with various positions and perceptions in other fields (e.g. the literary field for a literary translator especially when he/she is a novelist or critic him/herself) of which it would be artificial to isolate the translatorial habitus. A nuanced understanding of literary translators’ self-images and roles in cultural history asks for fine-grained analyses of their dynamic and plural intercultural habitus in all its complexities. It will lay bare translators’ multipositionality across linguistic, national and field-specific boundaries and the perceived aims, forms and functions of their multiple transfer activities, e.g. for the establishing of a national or international culture. Such an analysis may also contribute to a renewed model for interdisciplinary and intercultural historiographies of culture embedding translation within a multitude of transfer activities (translation, self-translation, etc.). As an illustration hereof, this essay analyzes a literary translator’s habitus in early 20th century Belgium.

About two decades ago, Xu, a leading translation studies scholar in China, claimed that “theoretical research on translation in China lags behind the West by at least twenty years” (Xu in Chin. Transl. J. (1):2–5, 1996, p. 3). The claim soon sparkled a controversy amongst Chinese translation teachers. Many strongly objected the assessment and on the contrary, insisted that translation studies in China has its own strengths, imbued with its own tradition and characteristics, and that it is totally inappropriate to compare translation theories and translation studies in China with those in the West (e.g. Dong in Chin. Transl. J. (6):2–5, 1997, p. 4). The controversy seems to have been settled now to the favor of the latter view. Xu’s claim has not been referred to for years, and translation studies has now become an established discipline, with both Ph.D. and M.A. translation (studies) programs offered in hundreds of universities in China, and considered as a second-tier discipline in the national academic discipline table. This is a settlement, of course, only based on institutional recognition. Academically, there has been no widely known agreement among translation scholars as to whether translation studies in China is now on a par with that in the West. Given such vastly different views as outlined above, we deem it useful to expand the discussions to include both Chinese and Western translation scholars so that a constructive comparison of translation studies in China and the West can be made.

Modern comparative literature with globalization phenomenon extends linguistic and political boundaries, even for conserving and revitalizing languages particularly minor languages with cultural and ethnic exchanges. Such this emergence of comparative literature might return from contemporary translational and cultural studies as crucial and effective factors in the study of comparative literature. The role, relationship, and impact of translation and cultural studies on modern comparative literature are explored via a descriptive analysis. Translational and cultural studies in current comparative literature studies facilitate the relevant studies and they play a supplementary role for literary study. This study confirms a significant relationship exists among contemporary translational, cultural, and literary works intangibly and inevitably that helps to study comparative literary works. The findings report cultural and translational studies can be fruity informing literary studies, new writing styles besides intercultural conversation; nevertheless, scholars of comparative literature have argued that their discipline has been significantly subsumed and substituted by translation studies. The results indicate contemporary translation and cultural studies have paved the way for comparative literature researchers to achieve cultural knowledge and to strengthen the culture with developing national literature.

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives from a comparative standpoint and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the specific phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions such as publishing houses and theatre companies. Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones is indispensable reading for those interested in Iberian studies, translation studies, in particular the history of translation in the Iberian Peninsula, and comparative literature.

Learning from Rivers

The correct translation of the Bible and of classical literature are among the roots of translation theory. With the Bible, faith was at stake: the major question was whether a translation was faithful and accurate, whether it was or wrong. Therefore, the ideal of the good translator as the one gets it right has influenced popular notions about translation. Most English readers rely on translation when reading the scriptures, or Homer, or Virgil, and so they expect to be dealt with adequately, to receive a correct, a true English version, an accurate preservation--or do readers prefer an aesthetically pleasing transformation? Where does accuracy end, where does pleasure begin? In linguistic terminology, a successful translation would ensure that the equivalent of the source language is reproduced in the target language (Nida/Taber, 12). Yet since Romantic writers are fundamentally concerned with the very nature of language, Romantic theories of translation, which constitute the foundation of modern translation theory, presume that translations must provide more than equivalents. Recent approaches have looked upon translation as cultural transfer (Bassnett/Lefevere, Snell-Hornby), cultural adaptation, or acculturation, and thus, the translator is no longer seen as working towards the higher aim of mediating between the divine and the human but as undertaking the secular task of linking two cultures. The centrality of translation to European Romanticism is undisputed. Through their reading and writing, individuals connected across linguistic and national boundaries, in fact, across the centuries, as Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer illustrates, a poem which stages several acts of translation: a translation from ancient Greek into English, a transposition from Elizabethan English into Keats's linguistic presence, which was still under the influence of classicist ideals, and a transcendence of mundane concerns aiming at a union of poetic minds. Of the six papers presented on the two panels organized by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the MLA in Chicago in December 2007, four (by Frederick Burwick, Michael R. Edson, Michael Macovski, Gillen D'Arcy Wood) testify to the necessity of probing much more deeply into issues of Romantic translation, whereas the other two (by Lee Erickson and myself) map out contexts of Romantic reading. While all of the first four papers share the belief that translation studies must be context-sensitive, they constitute case studies of transfer, adaptation, not just of mere language but also of national tradition, gender roles, the perception of Self and Other. Drawing on Schleiermacher, Stael, Goethe, Carlyle, Austin as well as Novalis, Burwick's paper maps out theories of Romantic translation and proves that the combat between fidelity, aesthetic pleasure, and cultural adaptation is by no means new. He highlights Stael's demand to keep the ambience in a translation, to make the reader aware of the text as translation, an idea that has recently reappeared in Venuti's much-quoted term foreignization (1995). If Stael's position sounds benign and wants to accept the alien into one's own intellectual horizon, to learn from the Other, Macovski's reference to Nietzsche, who likened pre-Romantic translation to conquering, introduced an inimical note and posed the question whether translations were necessarily always friendly acts of intercultural communication. Only in the late 18th century did the autonomy of the foreign source text, the original, come to be recognized. Thus, a translation could be politically and intellectually liberating because it would import new viewpoints. Drawing on Byron's Armenian writings, which include translations and a grammar, Macovski showed how the poet evokes associations with the Turkish oppression of Greece and eventually provides a mirror for a classic British past. …

From the Editors Anita McChesney and Peter Meilaender "Prosit Neujahr!" The arrival of a new year always brings change and the promise of new opportunities and new beginnings. This issue of the Journal of Austrian Studies brings a change of its own: It is the first in a decade that was not edited by Todd Herzog and Hillary Hope Herzog. Todd and Hillary have practically become an institution through their long and dedicated service, and under their outstanding leadership the journal has attained a new level of professionalization. The journal's very name bears their mark, since it was during their tenure that Modern Austrian Literature became the Journal of Austrian Studies. That change in name reflects a gradual broadening of the journal's disciplinary range, one that had been prepared under earlier editors such as Geoffrey Howes and Jacqueline Vansant, and Craig Decker, and was accelerated under Todd and Hillary. They successfully maintained the journal's high scholarly quality while diversifying the perspectives contained between its covers. In addition to a new name, the journal also acquired a new publisher during their editorship, moving to its current home with the University of Nebraska Press, as well as a new and attractive design. Students and scholars of Austrian Studies owe Todd and Hillary a great debt of gratitude for their decade of tireless editorial labor. Because they have left such large shoes to fill, it is with some measure of trepidation, as well as a great deal of excitement, that we begin our own tenure as the journal's new co-editors, hoping to build on the accomplishments of all those who have gone before us. The journal's broad disciplinary, geographic, cultural, and chronological scope is its most distinctive feature; the Journal of Austrian Studies is unique in supporting "all disciplines of Austrian Studies, acknowledging the diverse historical, multiethnic, and multilingual character of Austria, the former Habsburg territories, and their legacies" (to quote from [End Page xi] the Austrian Studies Association's mission statement). Our goal as editors is to promote that vision by expanding the journal's reach. We continue to welcome submissions on the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the journal's historic strength—but we also hope to feature scholarship on earlier periods and in fields such as history, politics, the arts, film, and more. Austrian culture, after all, gave rise to Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle; the Journal of Austrian Studies can be a home for philosophy. It produced the Austrian School of economics; economic thought can be represented in these pages. Religious studies, legal theory, translation studies—all can, and should, find their place here. In addition to expanding our disciplinary range, we also hope to increase our international reach. A journal that publishes in both English and German and that deals with all historical and cultural aspects of Austria and the former Habsburg territories should draw both contributors and readers from across North America and Europe and, increasingly, beyond. Central and Eastern Europe in particular are an obvious growth area for both the association and the journal. The recent conference sponsored by our colleagues in Poznań was an important step in this direction. Further such efforts will be essential in furthering our mission to support robust intellectual exchange across both disciplinary and national boundaries. Increasingly, this intellectual cross-fertilization can occur not only in the pages of the journal, or at the association's annual conferences, but also in other forms. Although the pandemic continues to complicate our lives, one silver lining of the past two years is that we have all discovered new ways of bringing exciting content to broad and diverse audiences. In a conscious effort to promote this type of exchange, the Journal of Austrian Studies sponsored two webinars in early 2021. The first, held on February 19, featured a discussion of the Journal of Austrian Studies special issue on Czernowitz (53.3). Co-sponsored by the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, it brought together the contributors to that issue for an informative presentation about the city's enduring historical, literary, and cultural significance. A second webinar...

This article explores how style may be implicated in the construction of ethnic identity in literary texts, and how associated linguistic patternings may be effaced or destroyed in interlingual translation. It is argued that the emphasis of the last decade within translation studies on the ethics of translation practice in the context of asymmetrical international power relations should extend to the study of intralingual translation, as a postnational phenomenon. Where non-standard language varieties are used in literature as the expression of an imagined national or sub-national community, as in some contemporary Scottish literature, translation as process and practice is already implicated in the source text. One way to understand the import of such literary practices is through ‘ethnostylistics’, tracing the stylistic expression of a culture’s concern with heterogeneity and difference both within and between national boundaries. After a discussion of ethics and ethnicity within translation studies, Antoine Berman’s analytic of translation is used as a framework for an analysis of the Danish translation of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar.

The translations of the works by Orhan Pamuk are significant in a variety of ways. Some of the notable English translators of his eminent works, namely Maureen Freely and Güneli Gün, shed light on how translation strategies can be employed influentially and effectively in that they contribute to the cultural exchange between Türkiye and the United States and the United Kingdom. Their strategic choices not only promote their achievement in cultural transfer into target American and British audiences by their target texts but also reveal the ways wherein such translation studies notions and concepts such as identity and ideology of the translator have crossed over national boundaries in the globe, which is the playground for international agents, power relations, and bonds of sovereignty. Henceforth, the visibility of Maureen Freely and Güneli Gün in their target texts both illuminates the nature of the multifaceted profound role of the translator and enables us to interrogate the intertwined effects of the cultural exchange both on Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon audiences as receptive cultures and Turkish source culture as the hereditary of a rich cultural and literary tradition. Within this study, the English translations of Orhan Pamuk’s İstanbul Hatıralar ve Şehir by Maureen Freely and Yeni Hayat by Güneli Gün have been selected as the sampling. As for relevant methodology, textual analysis and document analysis have been prioritized. The findings both involve translation studies in particular and (global) culture in general.

Artykuł dotyczy związków między zjawiskiem niepełnosprawności a translatoryką. Studia nad przekładem i studia o niepełnosprawności to relatywnie nowe dziedziny nauki, które do niedawna niewiele łączyło. Jednak od kilkunastu lat przekładoznawcy skupiają się na badaniach usług dostępu dla osób z niepełnosprawnością. Do usług tych należy m.in. audiodeskrypcja, tłumaczenie na język migowy czy też napisy dla niesłyszących. Mimo to wciąż niewiele jest badań poświęconych osobom z niepełnosprawnościami, które są twórcami, a nie odbiorcami, przekładu. Brakuje również translatoryków z niepełnosprawnością. Interdyscyplinarna perspektywa socjologii przekładu oraz studiów o niepełnosprawności może pomóc nadrobić te luki poprzez promocję bardziej włączającego podejścia do badań nad przekładem.

Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

A Few Guidelines for Productive Translation Studies 
 The paper is based on the concept of “productive Translation Studies”, understood as a science of translation anchored in the present and designed to help both translators and translation scholars. To provide some directions for productive Translation Studies, the paper starts with a diachronic analysis of the discipline. The field acquired its autonomy in the 80s when it was no longer considered a branch of linguistics. Nevertheless, translation scholars have manifested some hesitations in the past and there are aspects to be rectified. To establish the aim and methodology of the discipline, a clear definition of translation (both as a process and as a product) is needed. In addition, the nature of Translation Studies should be discussed: whether they are a scientific field or a branch of humanities and to what extent they are interdisciplinary. This historical overview is also used to discuss the “ages” of Translation Studies, as defined by Jean-René Ladmiral. Thus, prescriptive Translation Studies fix some general principles of a “good” translation and have a theoretical nature; descriptive Translation Studies rely on comparative and contrastive methods, analysing translation as a product; inductive Translation Studies aim at discovering what happens in the translator’s mind and are not developed yet; productive Translation Studies are connected to the reality of the market and provide methodological principles to translators and translation scholars to facilitate their work. In the final part of the paper, the author describes several strategies to be followed by contemporary Translation Studies. One step is to put an end to the scientific hesitations of the past and to have a coherent approach. Then, the debate concerning translation dichotomies (such as the possibility or impossibility of translation, faithfulness, and unfaithfulness in translation, translating form or translating meaning) should be left behind because it is unproductive. Connecting theory and practice and putting in contact with translators and translation scholars is another objective. Translation critics should give up the sacralization of the source text: in fact, any approach should put the translator on center stage to empower him/her. A double approach – psychological and sociological – may be needed to understand the translator’s choices: the psychological approach is based on the Theory of Sense, while the sociological analysis takes into consideration the constraints of the market. New technologies should become a topic of research. Also, translation studies should be rendered into various languages to disseminate new ideas and trends.

This article argues for a dialogue between translation and mountaineering studies and provides examples of how the two could successfully interact. It contributes to literary translator studies and translation history by bringing to the fore the careers of translators and mountaineers Janet Adam Smith and Nea Morin and by establishing links between their collaborative translation andcordée féminine, arguing that they played an active role as agents of both the literary and the mountaineering fields. Moreover, it provides instances of how the awareness of translation processes can expand and deepen the analysis of gendered dynamics in mountaineering non-fiction. Finally, it shows how mountaineering studies can benefit from translation studies in order to become more aware of its dissemination processes and international dynamics, and how translation studies can benefit from mountaineering studies to more fully comprehend and capture the depth of its involvement, dependence, and interaction with the non-literary world.