Translating the World

Translating the World
Author: Birgit Tautz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271080515

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

Translating Worlds

Translating Worlds
Author: William F. Hanks
Publisher: Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Anthropological linguistics
ISBN: 9780986132513

As the discipline of anthropology continues to chart a course along various turns (ontological, ethical, and otherwise), in this pathbreaking volume Carlo Severi and William Hanks return to the question of knowledge and translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology. Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Others have argued that, in purely abstract terms, translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. This collected volume suggests that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation of incommensurable paradigms, or worlds, may be the most""fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. With contributions on topics that range from the philosophical to the ethnographic (with refelctions on themes as diverse as tourism in New Guinea, shamanism in the Amazon, the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, and oral traditions in the Himalayas), this volume provides a new anthropological way to define translation, not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological principle. "

Against World Literature

Against World Literature
Author: Emily Apter
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1784780022

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.

Translation and World Literature

Translation and World Literature
Author: Susan Bassnett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317246594

Translation and World Literature offers a variety of international perspectives on the complex role of translation in the dissemination of literatures around the world. Eleven chapters written by multilingual scholars explore issues and themes as diverse as the geopolitics of translation, cosmopolitanism, changing media environments and transdisciplinarity. This book locates translation firmly within current debates about the transcultural movements of texts and challenges the hegemony of English in world literature. Translation and World Literature is an indispensable resource for students and scholars working in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature and world literature.

Why Translation Matters

Why Translation Matters
Author: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300163037

"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.

Osiris, Volume 37

Osiris, Volume 37
Author: Tara Alberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2021-06-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226825124

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Translating the World

Translating the World
Author: Birgit Tautz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2017-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271080493

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

World Politics in Translation

World Politics in Translation
Author: Tobias Berger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351806343

Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.

Tokens of Exchange

Tokens of Exchange
Author: Lydia H. Liu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2000-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822381125

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times. By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization. The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies. Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang