Reinventing Babel in medieval French : translation and untranslatability (c. 1120-c. 1250) /
"How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability w...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Series: | Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What, or who, determines what is translatable or what can, or cannot, be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way that translation negotiates with and inscribes asymmetries among languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what what would become the hegemonic global languages we know today"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations. |
| Audience: | Specialized. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191967948 0191967947 9780192699695 0192699695 9780192699688 0192699687 |