The author:
"My aim in this volume is to provide an overview of interpreting in the year 2000 to anyone interested in interpreting in general or indeed in becoming an interpreter. A number of specialist books have been published in recent years, all on specific areas of interpreting. I would like to provide a fuller picture. To this end I set about collecting information about international and regional Organizations in particular."
Provocative and controversial, The Scandals of Translation explores the anxious relationships between translation and the institutions that at once need it and marginalize it. Lawrence Venuti, a professional translator, argues that prevalent concepts of authorship degrade translation in literary scholarship and underwrite its unfavorable definition in copyright law. Exposing myriad abuses, Venuti provides stinging critiques of the Modern Language Association for its neglect of translation, as well as publishers for their questionable treatment of translators.
The first section of this book deals with translations as agents of change. Gideon Toury is a prominent figure in effecting the shift of focus from the translated text to the relationship between translations and the cultures that generate them. One of the ways he highlights translations as products of the host culture is through the study of psuedo-translations (or fictitious translations).
As linguists, we know that language matters. But to many people it might come as a surprise to realize that when students begin their university life, some of their main problems are linguistic ones. When students fail to communicate with professors in an appropriate register, or allow the relaxed style of a lecture to disrupt the formality of a term paper, they are falling into linguistic traps for which no one has prepared them. For non-native speakers, the difficulties may be particularly acute, but even for natives, mastering a range of new registers can pose serious difficulties. Yet this problem often passes unnoticed, perhaps because people are almost as oblivious to language as to the air they breathe or because tools have not been available to research the situation objectively.
The main idea of this study can be expressed in a few words: the syntactic component of the faculty of language is responsible for ordering categories and for ordering categories only. This would be a completely uninteresting thought, a truism, if one did not attempt to account for how and why the attested patterns emerge from the external requirements that the syntactic component has to satisfy.
