Translating the Body

The book, made up of two main parts, deals with the human body as reflected in language and literature.

The first part consists of four chapters: Reading the Body discusses the body as a non-verbal text that may be 'read' from several perspectives - sociological, psychoanalytical, archetypal, feminist. Describing the Body discusses the way in which Anglo-Saxon writers see the body and its different representations (natural, catastrophic, transgressive, archetypal). Transposing the Body analyses the possibility of translating the human body, viewed as a non-verbal text; special attention is paid to the transposition into literary texts of the body represented in paintings.

Translating the Body concentrates on the meaning acquired by words denoting body parts, when occurring in syntagmatic relations with other words - i.e. when they are terms in a collocation. Pertinent comments are made on the various ways of translating such English collocations into Romanian as well as on deviations from the formal correspondence between the two languages.

The second part of the book, Body Collocations, is an English-Romanian dictionary of body collocations. Sixty three body parts are presented in a variable number of structures and illustrated with quotations from English literary works translated into Romanian.

The book is meant for undergraduate and postgraduate students, for teachers of English, linguists and translators.