Translation/History/Culture is a collection of the most important statements on the translation of literature from Roman times to the 1920s. Arranged thematically around the main topics which recur over the centuries--power, poetics, language, education--it contains many texts previously unavailable in English.
This is the first anthology of translation studies edited by two leading Chinese scholars in the field published in the English speaking world. The essays deal with translation studies in a global/local context and from a Chinese perspective. Such cutting edge theoretic topics as globalisation, postcolonial theory, diaspora writing, polysystem theory, and East-West comparative literature and culture studies are discussed in an in-depth and accessible way.
In the late 1970s a new academic discipline was born: Translation Studies. We could not read literature in translation, it was argued, without asking ourselves if linguistic and cultural phenomena really were 'translatable' and exploring in some depth the concept of 'equivalence'. When Susan Bassnett's Translation Studies appeared in the New Accents
In recent years the marginal position which has defined translators and their texts has come under increasing and sustained challenge. However, although translation and subjectivity has been thoroughly considered in terms of post-colonialism and post-structuralism, there are few discussions which focus specifically on the construction of "Englishness" through vernacular translation. Using a range of theoretical approaches the five essays in this volume aim to realise such an understanding of translation by critically analyzing the cultural and political implications of translation and the construction of English subjectivities at particular historical moments.
Translation into a non-mother tongue or inverse translation, especially of literary texts, has always been frowned upon within Translation Studies in Western cultures and regarded by literary scholars and linguists as an activity of dubious worth, doomed to fail. The study, which received an award from EST in 2001, sets out to challenge the established view and to critically question some of the axiomatic assumptions of Western theorists.
