At Translation's Edge

Edited by Nataša Durovicova, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando; Translated by Lorena Terando

SERIES: Media Matters

Rutgers University Press

Since the 1970s, the field of Translation Studies has entered into dialogue with an array of other disciplines, sustaining a close but contentious relationship with literary translation. At Translation’s Edge expands this interdisciplinary dialogue by taking up questions of translation across sub-fields and within disciplines, including film and media studies, comparative literature, history, and education among others. For the contributors to this volume, translation is understood in its most expansive, transdisciplinary sense: translation as exchange, migration, and mobility, including cross-cultural communication and media circulation. Whether exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or silent film intertitles, this volume brings together the work of scholars aiming to address the edges of Translation Studies while engaging with major and minor languages, colonial and post-colonial studies, feminism and disability studies, and theories of globalization and empire.

Readers tired of nervous calls for clear disciplinary borders around Translation Studies will rejoice at this book, written half by translation scholars living on various knife edges of the discipline, half by people the editors call 'disciplinary neighbors, commuters, for whom questions raised in and by translation serve to queer, as it were, their professional working terrain.' Call me fractious, or fractal, but it’s always seemed to me that we all live at the edge of translation, always, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Douglas Robinson, author of Critical Translation Studies

At Translation’s Edge is an exciting, innovative and engaging volume which demonstrates the truly subversive potential of translation in the contemporary moment. Ranging across languages, historical periods and technologies, At Translation’s Edge shows how time and again translation disrupts normative thinking about language, writing and politics. This book is required reading for anyone concerned about the democratic future of our multilingual planet. Michael Cronin, author of Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene

NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ is the house editor of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she publishes 91st Meridian, the program’s online journal, and its book series. She is also co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives.

PATRICE PETRO is a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also serves as the Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and presidential chair in media studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of twelve books, including After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship (Rutgers University Press).

LORENA TERANDO is an associate professor of translation and interpreting studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the translator of Elvira Sánchez Blake’s Spiral of Silence (Espiral de silencios).

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: At Translation’s Edge - Nataša Ďurovičová and Patrice Petro
Part I Translation’s Disciplines
Chapter 1 The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing
Universals - Lydia H. Liu
Chapter 2 The Translation of Process - John Cayley
Chapter 3 Who’s It For: Towards a Rhetoric of Translation - Russell Scott Valentino
Part II Translation at the Limits of Nation-State
Chapter 4 Translation and Image: On the Schematism of Co-figuration - Naoki Sakai
Chapter 5 Bute Droma-Many Roads: Romani Resilience and Translation in Contact with the World - Deborah Folaron
Chapter 6 Ezhi-gikendamang Aanikanootamang Anishinaabemowin: Anishinaabe Translation Studies - Margaret A. Noodin
Chapter 7 “If you Could Only Understand My Language”: Counterfeit Script, Make-believe
Translation, and the Actor-Spectator Complicity in The Toll of the Sea (1922), Mr. Wu
(1927) and Hollywood Party (1937) - Yiman Wang
Part III Translation’s Practices & Politics
Chapter 8 Perspectives on the History of Translation in Latin America - Martha Pulido (Lorena Terando, Trans.)
Chapter 9 From Interpreting to Colloquial Translations: Tools Indispensible to Literary
Creation - Olga Behar (Lorena Terando, Trans.)
Chapter 10 Language, Policy, and Dis/ability in Senegal, West Africa - Elizabeth R. Drame
Chapter 11 The Translator in the Text - Suzanne Jill Levine
Notes on Contributors
Index

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