This volume presents selected papers from the first symposium on Hermeneutics and Translation Studies held at Cologne in 2011. Translational Hermeneutics works at the intersection of theory and practice. It foregrounds both hermeneutical philosophy and the various traditions -- especially phenomenology -- to which it is indebted, in order to explore the ways in which the individual person figures at the center of the mediating process of translation. Translational Hermeneutics offers alternative ways to understand the process of translating: it is a holistic and strategic process that enhances understanding by assisting the transmission of meaning in and across multiple social and cultural contexts. The papers in this collection accordingly provide a preliminary outline of Translational Hermeneutics. Gathered together, these papers broach a new discipline within Translation Studies. While some essays explain the theoretical foundations of this approach, others concentrate on practical applications in diverse fields, for example literary studies, and postcolonial studies.

This book focuses on the problematic issues arising when translating and interpreting classical Arabic texts, which represent a challenging business for many scholars, especially with regards to religious texts. Additionally, the reception of these interpretations and translations not only informs the perception of Muslims and their awareness of the outside world, but also impacts the vision and perception of non-Muslims of Islam and the Muslim world. Consequently, this book reconsiders the concepts of understanding and interpretation, and their nexus in the mechanism of translation, and proposes a novel, hermeneutic method of translating, interpreting, and understanding traditional and classical Arab texts. Handling the issues of understanding from a hermeneutical perspective is shown here to remove the possibility of translation and interpretation rendering a distorted translated text. Drawing on the powerful interpretive theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the hermeneutic method of translation starts from a premise that the meaning of a classical text cannot be deduced solely by linguistic analysis of its words, but requires in-depth investigation of the invisible, contextual elements that control and shape its meaning. Traditional texts are seen in this model as ‘travelling texts’ whose meaning is transformed across time and space. The hermeneutic method of translation allows the translator to identify those elements from the real-world that informed a classical text at the time of its writing, so that it can be adapted and made relevant to its contemporary context. Traditional texts can enlighten our minds and cultivate our souls; religious texts can elevate our behavior and thinking, and help refine our confused contemporary lives. When texts become isolated from their world, they lose this lofty goal of enlightenment and elevation.

This book has a twofold purpose. First, it seeks to define the place of vernacular translation within the systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages. Secondly, it examines the way that rhetoric and hermeneutics in the Middle Ages define their status in relation to each other as critical practices. --introd.

ContentsThe book presents the hermeneutical theory of translation focusing on the translator as a person. Translation is a dynamic task to be performed on the basis of a deep understanding of the original and an adequate strategy for authentic reformulation in another language. The theoretical foundations of hermeneutics laid by Schleiermacher, and later on developed by Heidegger, Gadamer and the phenomenologist Husserl, are presented, combined with a critical discussion of current theories in Translation Studies.The theoretical presentation is complemented by a collection of twelve text examples from various genres for a description of the practical translation process in the English and the German language, when one applies the hermeneutical categories of orientation. Thus the book is not only an introduction to translational hermeneutics but may also be used as a handbook for translator training.The AuthorRadegundis Stolze (*1950), Dr. phil., M.A., Dipl.- bers., lecturer at the University of Technology Darmstadt, visiting professor, seminar-leader, academic author and accredited practical translator. Long-term member of EST (European Society for Translation Studies) and BD (German Translators Association).

This is the first monograph to examine the notion of a translator's competence from the perspective of Gadamerian hermeneutics. The study's main objective is to depict different conceptualizations of translation as based on Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy of understanding and also to develop a theory of a translator's hermeneutic competences....

This book applies frameworks from behavioral economics to Western thinking about translation, mapping four approaches to eight keywords in translation studies to bring together divergent perspectives on the study of translation and interpreting. The volume takes its points of departure from the tensions between the concerns of behavioral and neoclassical economists. The book considers on one side behavioral economists’ interest in the predictable irrationality of “Humans” and its nuances as they unfold in terms of gender, here organized around Masculine Human, Feminine Human, and Queer perspectives, and on the other side neoclassical economists’ chief concerns with the unfailing rationality of the “Econs.” Robinson applies these four approaches across eight chapters, each representing a keyword in the study of translation—agency; difference; Eurocentrism; hermeneutics; language; norms; rhetoric; and world literature—with case studies that problematize the different categories. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive treatment of the behavioral economics of translation and promotes new ways of thinking in the study of translation and interpreting, making it of interest to scholars in the discipline as well as those working along interdisciplinary lines in related fields such as philosophy, literature, and political science.