Perspectives on Translation

In order to ensure its absolute authority, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946—1948), the Japanese counterpart of the Nuremberg Trial, adopted a three-tier structure for its interpreting: Japanese nationals interpreted the proceedings, second-generation Japanese-Americans monitored the interpreting, and Caucasian U.S. military officers arbitrated the disputes. The first extensive study on the subject in English, this book explores the historical and political contexts of the trial as well as the social and cultural backgrounds of the linguists through trial transcripts in English and Japanese, archival documents and recordings, and interviews with those who were involved in the interpreting. In addition to a detailed account of the interpreting, the book examines the reasons for the three-tier system, how the interpreting procedures were established over the course of the trial, and the unique difficulties faced by the Japanese-American monitors. This original case study of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal illuminates how complex issues such as trust, power, control and race affect interpreting at international tribunals in times of conflict.

While translation history in Canada is well documented, the history of the translation of Canadian fiction outside the nation remains obscure. Les Belles Étrangères examines the translation of Canadian English-language fiction in France. This book considers the history of this practice, the reasons for the move away from Quebec translators as well as the process and perils involved in this detour. Within a theoretical framework and drawing on primary sources, this study considers the historical, theoretical, and concrete aspects of this practice through the study of the translations of authors such as Robertson Davies, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Alistair MacLeod. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of English-language novels, poetry, and plays published and translated in France over the past 240 years.

Feminist theory has been widely translated, influencing the humanities and social sciences in many languages and cultures. However, these theories have not made as much of an impact on the discipline that made their dissemination possible: many translators and translation scholars still remain unaware of the practices, purposes and possibilities of gender in translation. Translating Women revives the exploration of gender in translation begun in the 1990s by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood's Re-belle et infidèle/The Body Bilingual (1992), Sherry Simon's Gender in Translation (1996), and Luise von Flotow's Translation and Gender (1997). Translating Women complements those seminal texts by providing a wide variety of examples of how feminist theory can inform the study and practice of translation. Looking at such diverse topics as North American chick lit and medieval Arabic, Translating Women explores women in translation in many contexts, whether they are women translators, women authors, or women characters. Together the contributors show that feminist theory can apply to translation in many new and unexplored ways and that it deserves the full attention of the discipline that helped it become internationally influential.

When Hermes handed over to Apollo his finest invention, the lyre, in exchange for promotion to the status of messenger of the gods, he relinquished the creativity that gave life to his words. The trade-off proved frustrating: Hermes chafed under the obligation to deliver the ideas and words of others and resorted to all manner of ruses in order to assert his presence in the messages he transmitted. His theorizing descendants, too, allow their pretentions to creatorship to interfere with the actual business of reinventing originals in another language. Just as the Hermes of old delighted in leading the traveller astray, so his descendants lead their acolytes, through thickets of jargon, into labyrinths of eloquence without substance. Charles Le Blanc possesses the philosophical tools to dismantle this empty eloquence: he exposes the inconsistencies, internal contradictions, misreadings, and misunderstandings rife in so much of the current academic discourse en translation, and traces the failings of this discourse back to its roots in the anguish of having traded authentic creativity for mere status.

The articles in this collection, written by medievalists and Renaissance scholars, are part of the recent "cultural turn" in translation studies, which approaches translation as an activity that is powerfully affected by its socio-political context and the demands of the translating culture. The links made between culture, politics, and translation in these texts highlight the impact of ideological and political forces on cultural transfer in early European thought. While the personalities of powerful thinkers and translators such as Erasmus, Etienne Dolet, Montaigne, and Leo Africanus play into these texts, historical events and intellectual fashions are equally important: moments such as the Hundred Years War, whose events were partially recorded in translation by Jean Froissart; the Political tussles around the issues of lay readers and rewriters of biblical texts; the theological and philosophical shift from scholasticism to Renaissance relativism; or European relations with the Muslim world add to the interest of these articles. Throughout this volume, translation is treated as a form of writing, as the production of text and meaning, carried out in a certain cultural and political ambiance, and for identifiable - though not always stated - reasons. No translation, this collection argues, is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Canadian federal governments offered varying degrees of support for literary and other artistic endeavour. A corollary of this patronage of culture at home was an effort to make the resulting works available for audiences elsewhere in the world. Current developments in the study of translation and its influence as cultural transfer have made possible new assessments of such efforts to project a national image abroad. Translating Canada examines cultural materials exported by Canada in addition to those selected for acquisition by German publishers, theatres, and other culture brokers. It also considers the motivations of particular translators and the reception by German reviewers of works by a wide variety of Canadian writers - novelists and poets, playwrights and children's authors, literary and social critics. Above all, the book maps for its readers a number of significant, though frequently unsuspected, roles that translation assumes in the intercultural negotiation of national images and values. The chapters in this collection will be of value to students, teachers, and scholars in a number of fields. Informed lay readers, too, will appreciate the authors' insights into the different ways in which translation has contributed to German reception of Canadian books and culture.

The translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as the chances of "replicating" in another language the one-off resonance of music, imagery, and truth-values of a poem are vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of mapping over into the target language the surface features or semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own right. These essays focus on the poetically viable translation - the derived poem that, while resonating with the original, really is a poem. They proceed from a writerly perspective, eschewing both the theoretical overkill that spawns mice out of mountains and the ideological misappropriation that uses poetry as a way to push agendas. The emphasis throughout is on process and the poem-to-come.