This book brings together an international team of leading translation teachers and researchers to address concerns that are central in translation pedagogy. The authors address the location and weighting in translation curricula of learning and training, theory and practice, and the relationships between the profession, its practitioners, its professors and scholars.
Originating at an international forum held at the University of Vic (Spain), the twelve essays collected here attest to important changes in translation practice and the assumptions which underpin them. Leading theorists respond to the state of Translation Studies today, particularly the epistemological dilemma between theories that are empirically oriented and those that are inspired by developments in Cultural Studies.
This book takes a linguistic approach to translation issues, looking first at the structural view of language that explains the difficulty of translation and at theories of cultural non-equivalence. A subsequent chapter on text types, readership and the translator's role completes the theoretical framework. The linguistic levels of analysis are then discussed in ascending order, from morpheme up to sentence, while a summarising chapter considers various translation types and strategies, again considered in relation to text type, author and reader.
On September 29–30, 2004, more than two hundred participants assembled in Lisbon, to take a fresh look at current orientations in Translation Studies (TS). In their Call for Papers, the organizers of the Fourth Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) had acknowledged that “perhaps the time has come to challenge some of the widely held assumptions, biases, and other presuppositions borrowed from other disciplines or based on beliefs and claims that are taken for granted.” Hence, the “Doubts and Directions” in the title of the Congress. Obviously, the contributions (more than 140 papers, 40 posters and six panels) did not all cover the same concerns, the same questions, the same concepts or the same methods. Diversity is a precious asset at a scientific meeting of this kind.
