Customer Reviews

The Translation Studies Reader

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Lawrence Venuti and his advisory editor, Mona Baker, made excellent choices of articles to showcase, in the ¨Translation Studies Reader.¨

They organize the book in chunks, and present an introduction to each era. These mini-essays summarize the period, integrating their choices of theorists as examples of how language and meaning were understood over the course of the 20th century. They also give more than ample bibliographic references.

In general they choose well-known cultural and linguistic theorists, and the most widely-read essays, but there are some exceptions. They also, especially as they move away from the 1950's and progressivly into 1990's, begin to cover recent political and critical concerns.

The book covers a wide range of translation theory. It spans from Benjamin's ''task of the translator'' to more structually focused processes and systems of the 1960's and '70's, to the more post-1980's issues of gender, complexities of meaning, identity, film studies and the role of language in fostering understanding between communities.

The essays I will leave to the imagination but I will go ahead and outline the table of contents.

1900-1930's: Walter Benjamin, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Ortega and Gasset

1940s-1950s: Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Willard V.O. Quine, Roman Jakobson

1960s-1970s: Eugene Nida, J.C. Catford, Jiri Levy, Katharina Reiss, James S. Holmes, George Steiner, Itmar Even Zohar, Gideon Toury

1980s: Hans J. Vermeer, Andre Lefevere, William Frawley, Philip E. Lewis, Antoine Berman, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Lori Chamerbain

1990's: Annie Brisset, Ernst-August Gutt, Gayatri Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, Keith Harvey, Lawrence Venuti

For anybody interested in the linguistic dimension of the history of ideas, linguistics, translation studies, or cultural studies, this book is a wonderful addition to your library.

Excellent textbook that helps to explain many of the different theories of translation, but it doesn't go into much detail on any particular one. Good first-step into the field of translation!

If you are interested in translation studies and need quick reference, you can find what you need.
I received this book just three days before holding a seminar for beginners in translation studies. I read and underlined the articles I found most useful, and they were of great help.

The book shows a selection of translators and their experiences with translating work and the challenges they met in translating. It is an excellent source encompassing all up to date methods of translating