Abstract

This collection of essays brings together a decade of writings on translation by leading international translation studies expert, Susan Bassnett. The essays cover a range of topics and will be useful to anyone with an interest in how different cultures communicate. Bassnett draws upon her personal experience to explore issues such as why the same things cannot be expressed in all languages, why translators in war zones risk their lives for their work, whether humour can travel across cultures, why translated menus are often so bad and whether poetry does indeed get lost in translation.

Theoretically savvy and intellectually stimulating, this collection of essays, written in highly readable prose by Susan Bassnett over a period of thirty years, offers something for everyone. Professor Bassnett writes about culture, history, religion and translation, and especially about the complex, multilayered relations amongst them, in a thoughtful, deeply humane manner.

Susan Bassnett is a leading international expert in translation studies, and author of best-selling books in the field that have been translated into some 20 languages. A bilingual who has practical experience of translation and interpreting. Bassnettâ??s accessible, jargon-free writing has made her work popular with students around the world. The forthright essays collected in this volume reflect ten years of writing regularly for professional translators and general readers.

Written for a general reader with an interest in language, the essays also nourish the scholarly mind.  Those familiar with translation will be stimulated by the fresh approaches to well-known questions from a personable guide.  To identify the subjects and themes of the essays is to capture only part of their richness.  The wealth of reflection lies in the examples that emerge, effortlessly it would seem, from Bassnett’s experience and learning.  It is her ability to engage with the casual and the serendipitous, to draw together moments across time and continents, that create a marvellous unity of tone, and drive home many important points about the exchange of cultures and languages.

This collection offers a fascinating and timely insight into the subject of one woman who is 'engaged in translation'…At times scholarly, at times resolutely practical, this book represents the unique ability of the translatior 'to shift perspective, to look simultaneously from within and from without, to question oneself and one's own culture as much as one questions the other'.

Susan Bassnett has done as much as anyone to help establish Translation as a rewarding subject of academic study. Now, in the thirty-nine wide-ranging chapters of this new book, she offers meditations on the subject that are as acute as they are lucid, and as lively as they are wise.

In this highly readable, stimulating and challenging collection of essays Susan Bassnett shows the incisive intelligence, humane engagement and breadth of knowledge that have been a constant in her writings over the years. The book is a must read for anyone who cares about the present and future of translation on our planet.