Translation: A Very Short Introduction

Bhanot, Kavita

Seitel, Peter

G S Jayasree

<em>Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader</em> responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the <em>Reader</em> demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction. <p/>The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by <em>ad verbum</em> versions, to facilitate comparison. <p/>The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions to their work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation. <p/>This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.

Translation--Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH <p/>General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie <p/>This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material. <p/>Volume 1 of <em>The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English</em> originates with what medievalists have long known, that virtually everything written in the Middle Ages in English can be regarded, one way or another, as a translation, and that medieval understandings of what constitutes literature were significantly more generous than many modern ones. It uses modern as well as medieval understandings of translation to inform its discussions (the two understandings have a great deal in common), and it aims to situate medieval translation in English as fully as possible in its various cultural contexts: this includes, in particular, the complicated inter-relations of translation throughout the period into Latin, and (for the Middle English period) of translation in French. Since it also understands the Middle Ages of its title as including the first half of the sixteenth century, it studies what has survived of nearly a thousand years of translation activity in England.