Cultures of Translation

The essays of this volume reflect the tremendous semantic extension the term 'translation' has experienced in the recent debates, which have transformed it into a key term in current issues about language, literature and culture. In the wake of the culture concepts of the 1980s, translation has emerged as the central analytical term for the contact of cultures, while the poststructuralist idea of the infinite chain of the signification process has helped to establish it as a dynamic model. In the course of recent research developments, the issues discussed in an ever-widening field of translation studies began to interconnect with issues discussed in equally topical and newly-established research areas of postcolonial studies and questions of 'World Englishes' and their lively cultural and literary exchanges. The essays of this volume take up and develop this general premise of a close interrelationship in processes of translation between language and culture, and the resulting linkage in the study of these processes between research in language and translation studies, on the one hand, and cultural and literary studies, on the other. The thematic scope stretches across the entire spectrum from issues in translations from one language and culture to another, through problems of and new avenues for cultural interchange as presented in works of art, to questions of translation theory and intercultural exchange on the most general level.