Postmodernist literary criticism and European philosophy have progressively seen translation as a key to literary theory. Marilyn Gaddis Rose shows how these approaches can also make translation a critical tool for the analysis and teaching of literature. Her discussions of individual translations illustrate the way translation reveals hidden aspects of texts, challenging readers with a provisional boundary, an interliminal space of sound, allusion and meaning. In this space readers must collaborate, criticize and rewrite the text, thus enriching their experience of literature. Vol. 6 in the series Translation Theories Explained

Lance Hewson's book on translation criticism sets out to examine ways in which a literary text may be explored as a translation, not primarily to judge it, but to understand where the text stands in relation to its original by examining the interpretative potential that results from the translational choices that have been made. After considering theoretical aspects of translation criticism, Hewson sets out a method of analysing originals and their translations on three different levels. Tools are provided to describe translational choices and their potential effects, and applied to two corpora: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and six of the English translations, and Austen's Emma, with three of the French translations. The results of the analyses are used to construct a hypothesis about each translation, which is classified according to two scales of measurement, one distinguishing between "just" and "false" interpretations, and the other between "divergent similarity", "relative divergence", "radical divergence" and "adaptation".

The book is a collection of the dialogues between Xu Jun, a well-known expert in French literary translation and eminent “Changjiang” scholar in translation studies in China, and some celebrated literary translators in contemporary China, some of whom are also literary scholars, linguists, poets, prose writers, and editors. It is a fundamental achievement of research on the literary translation in the 20th century in China, involving multiple literary types, such as novels, poetry, dramas, prose, and fairy tales; and multiple languages, such as English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Sanskrit. The dialogues are centered on fundamental issues in the theory and practice of literary translation, such as re-creation in literary translation, the relationship between form and content in literary translation, the subjectivity of literary translators, literary translation standards and principles, the gains and losses in literary translation, the principles and methods of literary criticism, and so on. Those translation experts’ experience and multiple strategies not only play an active role in guiding literary translators in practice but also benefit theoretical development in literary translation. Thus, the book will contribute to worldwide translation studies and get well recognized by translation studies students, teachers, and scholars in the world.

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

This volume examines the various linguistic and cultural problems which point towards the practical impossibility of conveying in one language exactly what was originally said in another. The author provides an exhaustive discussion of Spanish translations from English texts, including non-standard registers. Equivalence across languages, that most elusive of terms in the whole theory of translation, is discussed in terms of linguistic equivalence, textual equivalence, cultural equivalence and pragmatic equivalence. Other aspects studied include how translation has been perceived over the centuries, the differences and the similarities between a writer and a translator, plus a detailed examination of translation as process, all of which bring the problems of literary translation into perspective.