The rise of the reader and norms in twentieth-century English-language literary translation

Abstract

Literary translation into English in the twentieth century was the object of much comment. Translators tried to articulate what it was they were trying to do and the norms that governed the choices they made in their work. Reviewers articulated what they found acceptable or unacceptable about the translations they reviewed and theorists from a variety of disciplines used their own investigative tools to account for the phenomenon of translation. There was no single way of responding to or assessing translation into English in that century and an important aspect of any analysis must outline the shifts in the norms governing understandings of translation in that period. An inescapable conclusion in terms of translation norms is that the only constant again and again in English-language literary translation is variability.