With its roots deep in ancient narrative and in various reworkings from the late medieval and early modern period, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has left a lasting trace on modern European culture. ...This volume aims to chart the main outlines of this reception process in the broadest sense.
Ben Jonson animates The Alchemist with an intersection of languages. In this moral satire, he captures the layered dialects, specialized vocabularies, and social desires of London and holds them up ...for view. This essay examines the play's negotiation of 'vertical' and 'horizontal' modes of translation, also with reference to Shakespeare's treatment of overlapping languages, and to the use of multiple languages in a contemporary Catholic treatise on translation, A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures. Jonson's conclusion is that the friction between languages offers opportunities for cheats to thrive onstage and off, and that the predominant language of this world is sin, from which only lucid repentance can 'translate' us. His satire may stand on godly ground, but his insight is also useful for the current study of translated and adapted literature, particularly Shakespeare.
This article adopts a meta-theoretical and meta-academic perspective. It takes a critical look at how academic research in translation studies (as in other fields) is increasingly dominated by market ...forces as the world of higher education is drawn more and more into the sphere of neoliberal action and ideology. The paper acknowledges the positive effects of competitive pressures on scholarship - including increased research output, greater innovation and more efficient communication - but it also considers their adverse effects. More specifically, it is argued that the relentless pressure to innovate is having a negative impact on the intellectual rigour of our research by leading to needless fragmentation and ultimately undermining quality-control mechanisms. The paper concludes by making a number of recommendations to counterbalance the forces of the market.
This theoretical case study starts from a brief critical discussion of Eurocentrism in translation studies, underscoring the importance of the efforts toward a more inclusive, truly global and ...culturally balanced approach to translation which are increasingly being made in our field, often under the banner of “the international turn.” However, the rejection of Eurocentrism leaves open a wide range of alternative models and approaches, and this paper aims to show that the search for alternatives is not without its own difficulties. For example, it might be tempting for non-European scholars to derive an alternative way of thinking about translation from translational practices and discourses in their own continent that appear to be at odds with what is perceived as the “European” model of translation. A post-colonial sensibility would seem to make this an extremely attractive proposition. This is the line of thinking which inspired Edwin Gentzler’s
Translation and Identity in the Americas. New Directions in Translation Theory
(2008). The paper enters into a critical dialogue with Gentzler’s book in order to argue the general thesis that the replacement of one (perceived) continent-based paradigm by another (perceived) continent-based paradigm is not the best way forward, suffering as it does from a range of methodological problems. The best way to overcome Eurocentrism is not to construct and promote an American continentalism (“translation in the American sense”) as an alternative to it, or any other nationally or continentally defined concept of translation, for that matter.
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