At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?

At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?

Translating America focuses on one of the thorniest questions in American history: how do immigrants assimilate into American culture? And, how does American culture change with the their arrival? yet 50 years later social scientists were hard-pressed to find a trace of German culture. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated. In Translating America Connolly-Smith offers a significantly different analysis: that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. culture did not disappear overnight; rather it merged with new forms of American popular culture. Connolly-Smith posits that the lure and appeal of dance halls, vaudeville, nickelodeons, the films of D.W. Griffith, the music of John Philip Sousa, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, and even baseball games all helped German Americans to assimilate and become German-Americans.

MACHINE GENERATED CONTENTS NOTE: PART 1 TRADING AMERICA: CIRCULATION OF IDENTITIES, GOODS AND CULTURAL PRACTICES: Re-Translating America's Words: A View from Beyond / Mario Corona -- Fun in the Cup: From the Italian Espresso Bar to the Globalized "Starbucks Experience" / Eva-Sabine Zehelein -- Disneyland in Europe: Or, How to Translate "Cultural Chernobyl" into Cultural Shock "Therapy"/ Simona Sangiorgi -- Mainscreening America: Cultural Translation in US TV Series/ Gianna Fusco -- Foreign Route of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, 1949-2009/ Alessandro Clericuzio -- La linea della palma in Brooklyn: Sicily and Sicilian America in Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso/ Francesca De Lucia -- PART 2 RE-WRITING STORIES ACROSS THE MEDIA: Coloniality, Performance, Translation: The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America/ Elizabeth Maddock Dillon -- Left in Translation: Mirror Images of Italy and America in the Italian TV Version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun/ Valerio Massimo De Angelis -- Transformation of Wilderness from the Aesthetic of the Sublime to the Aesthetic of Life: Into the Wild as a Palimpsest of the American Myth of Nature/ Paola Loreto -- Eternal Frame: Photographs, Fiction, and Falling Men in Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer/ Francesco Pontuale -- In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Art Spiegelman's Representation of Trauma in the Comic-Book Form/ Stefania Porcelli -- Translating Comics into Literature and Vice Versa: Intersections between Comics and Non-Graphic Narratives in the United States/ Paolo Simonetti -- PART 3 LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION BETWEEN THE US AND ITALY: Never-Finished Job: Translating H.D.'s Trilogy into Italian/ Marina Camboni -- Translating with an Accent: The Importance of Sound, Orality and History in the Works of Italian American Women Poets/ Elisabetta Marino -- Between God(fathers) and Good(fellas): To Kill, To Slur, To Eat in Tony Soprano's Words/ Cinzia Scarpino -- PART 4 POLITICAL AND CULTURAL MODELS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC: "Let Trade Be as Free as Air:" The "Liberal" American Revolution and the Early State-Building/ Matteo Battistini -- Conservative Translation of European Classical Liberalism: William Graham Sumner's Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America/ Gabriele Rosso -- Ethnic Press and the Translation of the US Political System for Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1924-1941/ Stefano Luconi -- Against the Stream: American-European Transnational Contacts During the Nazi Years. A Labor Perspective/ Catherine Collomp -- Translating Italian Americanness in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas/ Fulvio Orsitto. Publisher's note.

Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little is known about the younger generation, often considered "invisible." Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the "work" they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution. Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be "in the middle" or the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

A ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenising use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas uncovers how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of U.S. imperialism, one that prefigures many of the concerns about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity animating American studies today. During the 1880s and early 1890s, the Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary José Martí and other Latino migrants living in New York City translated North American literary and cultural texts into Spanish. Lomas reads the canonical literature and popular culture of the United States in the Gilded Age through the eyes of Martí and his fellow editors, activists, orators, and poets. In doing so, she reveals how, in the process of translating Anglo-American culture into a Latino-American idiom, the Latino migrant writers invented a modernist aesthetics to criticize U.S. expansionism and expose Anglo stereotypes of Latin Americans. Lomas challenges longstanding conceptions about Martí through readings of neglected texts and reinterpretations of his major essays. Against the customary view that emphasizes his strong identification with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the author demonstrates that over several years, Martí actually distanced himself from Emerson’s ideas and conveyed alarm at Whitman’s expansionist politics. She questions the association of Martí with pan-Americanism, pointing out that in the 1880s, the Cuban journalist warned against foreign geopolitical influence imposed through ostensibly friendly meetings and the promotion of hemispheric peace and “free” trade. Lomas finds Martí undermining racialized and sexualized representations of America in his interpretations of Buffalo Bill and other rituals of westward expansion, in his self-published translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular romance novel Ramona, and in his comments on writing that stereotyped Latino/a Americans as inherently unfit for self-government. With Translating Empire, Lomas recasts the contemporary practice of American studies in light of Martí’s late-nineteenth-century radical decolonizing project.