Free reading materials

This article gives a concise and accessible overview of some key moments in Chinese translation theory and practice. It can be used as a useful supplement to the comments in Chapter 2 on the Chinese tradition of Buddhist translation and the influence of Yan Fu on modern Chinese translation scholars.

This is a study that seeks to categorize the form and focus of translator prefaces based on a corpus of prefaces of translations into Romanian. It thus provides an advance on the Proust case study in Chapter 2 and links to other concepts such as fidelity in Chapter 3.

This paper by Ju Miao makes reference to the work of Nida, Newmark and Koller discussed in Chapter 3 and discusses the difficulties of achieving equivalent effect between English and Chinese.

Semko reviews Russian translation theory, often neglected in the West. This detailed article focuses on linguistic concepts as they are linked to the hermeneutic circle (compare Chapter 10). Some influence of Nida’s work is discerned, especially in the discussion of elements that are communicatively relevant, or irrelevant, in translation.

This article discusses the meaning of various common, and sometimes overlapping, terms in translation theory: procedures, techniques, strategies, processes, methods, etc. Some crucial distinctions are made for the application of such metalinguistic terms to the study of translation.

Christiane Nord, one of the key theorists discussed in Chapter 5, presents the basic principles of functional translation and explores how loyalty is an important element in literary and Bible translation.

This article presents in some depth the concepts of systemic functional linguistics that underpin the discourse analysis discussed in this chapter. Its use for translation quality assessment is central, as was seen in the description of House’s model in the chapter.

A key figure in the Manipulation School and systems theories described in this chapter, Theo Hermans here provides a detailed exploration of the potential of norms as a tool for the analysis of historical translation. He further discusses the theoretical implications of a norms-based approach, incorporating work by Luhmann and Bourdieu.

In this article, Wallmach challenges the feminist translation strategies described in Chapter 8.

The varied contributions in this forum, from some major figures in the field, focus on the understanding of the concept of ‘cultural translation’ and the metaphor it creates of the translated subject. This is an illustration of how more recent work has extended cultural studies approaches to the study of translation. It is worth making a summary of the views of each of the contributors towards the subject in order to better understand the breadth of cultural translation.

An interesting case study of the domestication in English of a best-selling novel by Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany. Booth discusses the ethical choices at stake, and the relative authority of author and translator.

This article discusses in more detail the central ideas of this chapter. Florentsen describes how deconstruction challenges Nida's concept of equivalence of meaning (see Chapter 3). Instead, translation is presented as an untranslatable metaphor.

Laviosa summarizes the growth of early corpus-based translation studies and importantly links it to investigations of central phenomena such as translation universals from the descriptive studies tradition (see Chapter 7).

This article is an example of how concepts from translation theory can be applied to, and be affected by, translation practice – in this case in the EU. It is useful for interrogating some of the central concepts of translation theory and, for that reason, for generating ideas for research projects.