Originally published in 1993, Translation as Social Action is a varied collection of essays, which addresses translation as social action as its central theme, the book proposes a model of the translator as an agent in his or her own right. Translation is seen not just as a transfer of meanings from one language to another, but rather as an arena in which different cultures meet in the person of the translator. This perspective provides a complete contrast to Western translation studies, concerned with whether or not translation is really possible. Together the essays reveal a distinct tradition grappling with the most important topics in translation studies in ways that are different and challenging. The collection is essential reading for translation studies, as well as providing an interesting perspective on comparative literature and Eastern European studies.
The view of translation as a social, cultural and creative practice has dominated Russian and Bulgarian practice. This collection of essays aims to make this tradition accessible to students in the West.
How can we better understand the past, present and future of Social Action through Music (SATM)? This ground-breaking book examines the development of the Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín (the Network of Music Schools of Medellín), a network of 27 schools founded in Colombia’s second city in 1996 as a response to its reputation as the most dangerous city on Earth. Inspired by El Sistema, the foundational Venezuelan music education program, the Red is nonetheless markedly different: its history is one of multiple reinventions and a continual search to improve its educational offering and better realise its social goals. Its internal reflections and attempts at transformation shed valuable light on the past, present, and future of SATM. Based on a year of intensive fieldwork in Colombia and written by Geoffrey Baker, the author of El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (2014), this important volume offers fresh insights on SATM and its evolution both in scholarship and in practice. It will be of interest to a very varied readership: employees and leaders of SATM programs; music educators; funders and policy-makers; and students and scholars of SATM, music education, ethnomusicology, and other related fields.
This book is about conducting research on the process and outcomes of the translation and implementation of evidence-based practices in social work. Its aims are to outline a strategy for conducting such research and to identify the infrastructure and resources necessary to support such research within the field of social work.
This book analyses the translation policies and practices of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), engaging in critical questions around the ways in which translation can redress power dynamics between INGOs and the people they work with, and the role of activist researchers in contributing to these debates. The volume examines the duality of translation and interpreting in INGOs, traditionally undervalued and under-resourced while simultaneously acknowledged as a powerful tool in ensuring these organisations work according to their own values of equal access to information, dialogue, and political representation. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and interview data with a wide variety of INGOs, Tesseur offers unique insights into if and how INGOs plan for translation and interpreting needs while also critically reflecting on her own experience and the ways in which activist researchers like her can ensure social justice efforts are fully reflected in their own working practices. Encouraging a new interdisciplinary research agenda, the volume seeks to raise the profile of language and translation in humanitarian and development contexts and cross-disciplinary dialogue in scholarship on these issues. The book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, sociolinguistics, development studies, and international relations.
The discipline of translation studies has gained increasing importance at the beginning of the 21st century as a result of rapid globalization and the development of computer-based translation methods. Today, changing political, economic, health, and environmental realities across the world are generating previously unknown inter-language communication challenges that can only be understood through a socially-oriented and data-driven approach. The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the manifold interactions between translation studies and the social and natural sciences, enabling for the first time the exchange of research resources and methods between translation and other domains' experts. Twenty-nine chapters by international scholars and professional translators apply translation studies methods to a wide range of fields, including healthcare, environmental policy, geological and cultural heritage conservation, education, tourism, comparative politics, conflict mediation, international law, commercial law, immigration, and indigenous rights. The articles engage with numerous languages, from European and Latin American contexts to Asian and Australian languages, giving unprecedented weight to the translation of indigenous languages. The Handbook highlights how translation studies generate innovative solutions to long-standing and emerging social issues, thus reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.
The cross-linguistic and cross-cultural practice of translation is a field of rapidly growing international importance. World-renowned experts offer new and multidisciplinary insights on this subject, viewing translation as social action and intercultural communication, and as a phenomenon of languages in contact and a socio-cognitive process.
White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate expectations for critical and analytic writing. White employs his unique approach by analyzing individual cases involving the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution and demonstrates how a judge translates the facts and the legal tradition, creating a text that constructs a political and ethical community with its readers. "White has given us not just a novel answer to the traditional jurisprudential questions, but also a new way of reading and evaluating judicial opinions, and thus a new appreciation of the liberty which they continue to protect."—Robin West, Times Literary Supplement "James Boyd White should be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, solely on the strength of this book. . . . Justice as Translation is an important work of philosophy, yet it is written in a lucid, friendly style that requires no background in philosophy. It will transform the way you think about law."—Henry Cohen, Federal Bar News & Journal "White calls us to rise above the often deadening and dreary language in which we are taught to write professionally. . . . It is hard to imagine equaling the clarity of eloquence of White's challenge. The apparently effortless grace of his prose conveys complex thoughts with deceptive simplicity."—Elizabeth Mertz, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities "Justice as Translation, like White's earlier work, provides a refreshing reminder that the humanities, despite the pummelling they have recently endured, can be humane."—Kenneth L. Karst, Michigan Law Review
"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.
