The Practices of Translation

As commentators such as Brian Nelson have argued, literary translation is “a distinctive form of creative writing” that constitutes a “performance” of the source text. The fact that there can exist different translations of a given literary work, for example, is proof enough of the creative role played by the translator. It demonstrates that the translator has choices – choices that are far from trivial, especially when it comes to dealing with words or concepts that are peculiar to the source culture and foreign to the target readership. Thus, while translation is undoubtedly an “art”, as a recent number of this journal highlighted, it is also a value-laden activity, as it forces the practitioner to adopt a stance with respect to “otherness”: to acknowledge and emphasize it, thereby challenging the habits and expectations of the target culture; or to deny and transform it by minimizing or erasing the text’s foreignness in order to make it conform to the norms of the receiving culture. As this dilemma indicates, the challenges confronted by the translator raise important questions, not just about what we might term the “mechanics” of translation but more generally, on an ideological level, about the ways in which the cultural distinctiveness of texts is approached

Biology · Linguistics · Translation (biology · Computer Science · Genetics · History · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices