Translation as Text

As translation plays an increasingly important role in industry, science, technology, commerce, politics and the international economy, the search for better, more informed methods of translation proceeds on a global scale. New, sometimes competing, models for describing translation are being developed and applied. These new models are interdisciplinary, borrowing concepts from linguistics, literary criticism, cognitive science, psychology, and sociology. The basic tenet of "Translation as Text" is that we do not translate words, but texts, and that these competing models can be integrated into a more global theory of translation by viewing the translation process as a primarily textual process. The authors examine in detail the characteristics that make a good tranlation a text. They propose a textual model of translation, emphasising the text-bound nature of all translation activity. Without attempting to be a comprehensive overview of translation science, "Translation as Text" convincingly resolves many issues of theoretical and practical importance to translators and translation scholars and develops a unified picture of translation as "text-induced text production".
The volume examines several different models of translation and emphasises their shared relationships to a common object of interest, the text. In particular, this study focuses on the empirical relationship between the theory of trnslation and its practice.