Literary Translation

Anthony Pym

Pre-print of: Pym, A. (2020). Literary Translation. In J. Frow (Ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Literature. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1107. Reprint in J. Frow (Ed.) The
Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, 2022.

Summary
Literary translation has progressively been dominated by a Western translation form that imposes basic
binarisms, assuming separate (national) languages, a foundational opposition between domesticating and
foreignizing translation strategies, and separate voices for author and translator, with the latter in a subordinate
position. This binary, individualist, and nationalist conceptualization furnishes a way of talking about
translations that often has little to do with the vitality and pragmatism of the literary translator’s craft, where
there are mostly more than two options in play. When coupled to notions of literariness that privilege means of
expression, the form also produces strong concepts of untranslatability, usually based on the banal observation
that different languages offer different means of expression. A strong answer to the alleged impossibility of
translation is the idea, found in Walter Benjamin and Andrey Fedorov, that literary translations do not replace
their “source” or “start texts” but are instead an interpretative extension of them, and should be read as such.
The Western translation form also overlooks the variety of translative activities that existed prior to its rise in
the Early Modern period. With its emphasis on separation and accuracy, it travelled out with the railway lines
and steam printing presses of modernity, supplanting most of the non-Western translation forms as literary
practices. Western translation studies, as an academic discipline, has followed the same paths several
generations later, imposing its binary metalanguage in the process. In this, it has become part and parcel of a
world configuration of networks where a few central languages, with English as a super-central language, have
enormous numbers of translations being done from them, while they themselves appear to have relatively few
translations in them. This has been called the “three-percent problem,” so named because only three to four
percent of texts in English are translations. The low percentage is nevertheless a function of the huge number of
titles published in English, which means that English regularly has more translations than do French or Italian,
for example. There are nevertheless hegemonic relations in the way that international literary events are created
in central languages and then translated outwards, such that a disproportionate degree of fame tends to accrue to
those who write in the central languages. Can this configuration be changed? If the foundational binarisms of
the Western translation form were based on the fixity of the printing press, which separated languages and
objectified stable texts, then new translation forms should be sought in the global accessibility and fluidity of
digital technologies, which offer translators unexplored possibilities.

Keywords: translation forms, binarism, translation flows, the three-percent problem, translator identity,
translation policy

Many claims can be made about the hidden creativity of literary translation, about its power
to change cultures and the relations between them. The practice and study of translation
nevertheless involves accepting some kind of back seat, a derivative status, a lesser creativity,
alongside that of all the editors, publishers, printers, critics, and readers who also make
literature happen. One renounces homage not just to auctorial inspiration in its many guises,
but also to that more profound genius that Lukács, for example, saw in the power of the
(realist) artist to grasp the profound reality of a human place and time. Such things may exist,
but they are not the stuff of translation.
At the same time, the study of literary translation traces myriad flows of intellectual
energy from culture to culture, countless instances of dependence, resonance, and
stimulation, and innumerable modes of adaptive creativity that must at least question the
essentialisms of inspiration and genius. Once you accept a certain secondariness, much is
gained and many new questions open. A different kind of literary practice and study is made
possible.

1
Translation Forms

“Translation is a form,” wrote Walter Benjamin.1 Exactly what he meant by “form” is open to
conjecture, but he immediately refers to the relation between the translation and the text it in
some way represents. History is littered with contradictory statements about that kind of
form, which in effect amount to a set of ideals about what translation is, and even more about
what a good translation should be.2 There is not just one translation form; there are many, and
they are thus historical. Given this plurality, translation forms are most usefully seen as ideal
or idealized relations that are historically foisted upon continua of textual practices. All
literary texts transform other literary texts through borrowings, allusions, and adaptations,
sometimes known as intertextuality, and there is no one universal point where some of those
transformations become translation while others remain something else. Recitative epics have
long been retold anew, with each telling adapted incrementally to the language preferences of
the audience; the copying of manuscripts would introduce similar series of changes,
constantly adjusting across dialect chains and different stylistic expectations. There are,
however, various sets of institutionalized ideas, mutable over history and across cultures,
according to which only some texts are in a translational relationship to others; not every text
is always a translation, and not all processes of transformation need be called translational.
Those sets of ideas can be called translation forms.
The form that was still dominant in the twentieth century can be traced from the Early
Modern period, spreading out beyond Europe as a companion of modernity: where the
railways and steam presses went, the Western translation form followed. Its tenets are not
exclusively literary, although literary and philosophical translations do tend to epitomize the
tradition. In technical terms, the form works as a combination of simple maxims: 1) there is
an assumed move from one language to another, 2) as one text becomes longer, so does the
other, and 3) the “I” of the translation does not refer to the translator (i.e. translators use the
“alien-I”, as do actors).3 These three maxims can all be transgressed to achieve meaningful
effects, playing off the translation form. And they can all be found separately from the
Western translation form. The form results when they are activated together.
Medieval translations, for example, could transgress the quantitative maxim fairly
freely, occasionally allowing the translator a first-person voice in the translation: “Ne vuil
sun livre translater,” says the translator Wace in the middle of translating the Historia Regum
Britanniæ in the twelfth century, “I do not want to translate [this part of] the book.” The
intrusive first person not only breaks the maxim of the alien-I but also reveals further
breaking of the maxim of quantity: Wace has been freely rendering selected events from
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s previous text, then giving the result his own name and calling it a
new work, the Roman de Brut.4 When we read that text as a translation and notice those

1
Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by
Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 50.
2
For an entertaining summary, see Theodore Savory, The Art of Translation (Boston: The Writer Inc., 1968),
49-50, which begins: “A translation must give the words of the original. / A translation must give the ideas of
the original.”
3
The three maxims do much the same work as Gideon Toury’s three translation postulates in Descriptive
Translation Studies and beyond. Revised edition (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012).
4
Nancy Vine Durling, “Translation and Innovation in the Roman de Brut,” in Medieval Translators and their
Craft, edited by Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University,
1989); Anthony Pym, “On History in Formal Conceptualizations of Translation,” in Why Concepts Matter.
Translating Social and Political Thought, edited by Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter (Leiden: Brill, 2012),
59-72.

2
features, we are effectively imposing our own translation form on a practice that did not have
much like it. There was simply a different translation practice at work.5
Much the same can be said for literary practices in very many parts of the world.
Historians have remarked on the absence of Western translation precepts prior to the arrival
of modernity in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries in Japan, the Ottoman Empire,
India, and South East Asia. There was, however, a vast range of translative practices prior to
that moment, some of them remarkably different from Western practice. In Japan, for
instance, one finds kanbun-kundoku or “Chinese texts read in Japanese,” where Sinitic
characters were glossed to indicate an unwritten but mental Japanese version, with changes
towards something like a Western concept of translation in the eighteenth century.6 In India,
the range of concepts included chhaya, which sees one language “shadowing” the other, and
anuvad, which casts translation as a “saying after,” emphasizing the temporal gap rather than
the spatial metaphors typical in Western terms for translation.7 In Ottoman tradition, terceme
was twinned to imitation rather than accuracy, with the latter becoming a criterion under the
influence of French in the nineteenth century.8 In Arabic and South Asian Islamic literatures,
tarjam ‫ ﺗﺮﺟﻢ‬variously means to construe, to put into words, to transpose and explain,
embracing a far wider range of transformations than would the criteria of the Western
translation form.9 In cultures where the author function is relatively weak – not just as a
constraint on fictionality but also as an institutionalized property bond between author and
text –, the range of translative activities is typically wide. In other words, translators are freer
to act as authors; they are less given to secondariness; there are fewer separations.
Exactly why Western cultures should have developed a more restrictive translation
form is a matter for speculation. The admonitions of Bible translation (“You shall not add to
the word, not take away from it”10) might be part of the mix, and words for translation in
European languages do tend to bring up images of directed movement from one side to
another (trans-, über, över-) or of something being led in a particular direction (traduc-, пере-
во́д). The etymologies, though, have remained much the same while translators’ activities
have varied, and a great deal more than the Bible was translated. Changes in translation
practices tend to concur more with changes in ideologies and technologies, at least on the
level of centuries, although any causal relationships remain complex and difficult to trace.
We might surmise that Gutenberg gave translators a relatively fixed text to work from, that
printed forms became progressively standardized, and the age of print then coincided with an
age of standardized national languages. There was thus not only an established object to
which the translator could profess to be “faithful” or “accurate,” but also an institutionalized
separation of languages that further reinforced the two sides of the operation. Further, the
print-based standardization of national languages enabled them to be seen as theoretically
equal in status, thus enabling ideals of equivalent expression, whereas pre-print translation

5
This earlier form is in fact signaled by Wace’s use of the Romance form “translater,” which would be
progressively replaced by traduco and traductio under the influence of Leonardo Bruni from 1400.
6
Rebekah Clements, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 105; Yukino Semizu, “Invisible Translation: Reading Chinese Texts in Ancient Japan,”
in Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans. Vol 2 (Manchester, St. Jerome, 2006), 283-295.
7
Harish Trivedi, “In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms: ‘Translation’ in India,” in Translating Others, edited
by Theo Hermans. Vol 1 (Manchester, St. Jerome, 2006), 102-119.
8
Saliha Paker, “Ottoman Conceptions of Translation and its Practice: The 1897 ‘Classics Debate’ as a Focus of
Examining Change,” in Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans. Vol 2 (Manchester, St. Jerome, 2006),
325-348.
9
Ronit Ricci, “On the Untranslatability of ‘Translation’: Considerations from Java, Indonesia,” Translation in
Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories, edited by Ronit Ricci and Jan van der Putten (Manchester, St. Jerome,
2011), 57-72.
10
Deuteronomy 4:2; cf. Deuteronomy 12:32, Revelation 22:18.

3
practices had often been based on an projected hierarchy of languages, where translation was
assumed to go from a more perfect to a less perfect language.
Renaissance individualism made its contribution as well: when the translator and
printer Estienne Dolet formulated his rules for translation in 1540, he insisted that the one
translator should know both the start (or “source”)11 and target languages,12 whereas
medieval commentators had often not hidden the work of translation teams with
complementary language skills and occasionally intermediary languages (for example, some
twelfth-century Arabic texts would be mediated by spoken Romance before being translated
into Latin). This fundamental separation of printed languages gave rise to a series of powerful
conceptual binarisms: start versus target, author versus translator, letter (of the start text)
versus spirit (of what moves), and some kind of morally regulated relation between those two
sides then being expressed in terms of faithfulness, accuracy, or equivalence – they all
assume the fundamental binarism.
Binary thinking has by no means been a universal of translation theory: a “middle
way” would be formulated by the Valencian scholar Joan Lluís Vives in 153313; John Dryden
famously distinguished between three levels of translation: “metaphrase” (broadly,
literalism), “paraphrase” (which made linguistic adjustments) and “imitation” (artistic
recreation)14; the Chinese translator Yan Fu saw translation as a play of not two but three
guiding principles: xìn 信 (faithfulness), dá達 (expressiveness), and yǎ雅 (elegance).15 That
said, the great debates of the Western form have tended not to extend beyond the foundation
binarisms of one side versus the other. When French neo-classicism gave priority to the
receiving culture, purporting to take only what is most pleasing from the foreign text, the
argument assumed an opposition between eloquence and literalism: “the best translations
seem to be the least faithful,” opined Perrot d’Ablancourt in 1654 when introducing his
translation of Lucien.16 It was that translation that reportedly reminded Gilles Ménage of “a
girl I much loved at Tours, who was beautiful but unfaithful.”17 The ensuing tradition of the
belles infidèles, with its gratuitous gendering of translation as secondary and feminine, was
nevertheless not entirely dominant in French neo-classicism. In 1759 the encyclopedist Jean
le Rond d’Alembert declared that a translation should combine noble liberty in its use of
eloquent target language with “the trace and genius of the original,” as when one tastes a
good wine and savors the climate and soil from which it has come (“ce goût de terroir”).18
D’Alembert’s argument for the foreign was picked up, in the same binary terms but with less

11
English-language translation scholars generally prefer the term “source text.” The term “start text”
nevertheless has several advantages: 1) it does not suggest that the anterior text operates as a unique
transcendental signified for the elements in a translation, 2) it recognizes that translators work with translation
memories, glossaries, and machine-translation databases that are also “sources” for their products, and 3) it
concurs with terms in other European languages: Ausgangstext, texte de départ, texto de partida, testo di
partenza.
12
Estienne Dolet, La manière de bien traduire d'une langue en aultre (Lyon: chés Dolet mesme, 1540).
13
Joan Lluís Vives, De ratione dicendi (Lovanij: ex officina Rutgeri Rescija, 1533) Vives identified a “third genre”
of translation in which “the matter and the words are [both] weighed up”: “Tertium genus est, ubi & res & verba
ponderantur” (168v).
14
John Dryden, “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles” (1680), in Works, ed. Edwin Niles Hooker et al., 20 vols.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), I, 114-115. See David Hopkins. “Dryden as Translator”,
Oxford Handbooks Online (2014): DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.10
15
Yan Fu, Preface to 天演論 Tianyan lun (On evolution) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1989), xi.
16
Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, trans. Lucien, Première partie (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1564).
17
Cited in Roger Zuber, Les «Belles Infidèles» et la formation du goût Classique (Paris, Armand Colin, 1968),
195-196.
18
Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Observations sur l’art de traduire,” in Cent ans de théorie française de la
traduction. De Batteux à Littré (1748-1847), edited by Lieven D’hulst (Lille, Presses Universitaires de Lille,
1990).

4
appealing metaphors, by the German preacher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sought a
foreignizing translation strategy that would help develop the receiving language.19
Schleiermacher famously formulated the opposition as follows: “Either the translator leaves
the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward that author, or the
translator leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward that
reader.”20 Yet he actually went further and excluded any possible mixing of the two
translation methods: “just as they must belong to one country, so people must adhere to one
language or another, or they will wander untethered in an unhappy middle ground.”21 The
binary separation of translation methods was underpinned by loyalty to a language and a
country.
This binary, individualist, and nationalist conceptualization has given us a way of
talking about translations that often has little to do with the vitality and pragmatism of the
translator’s craft. A case in point might be the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Hong Lou
Meng 红楼梦, for which there are translations into English by Xianyi and Gladys Yang,
published in Beijing, and David Hawkes and John Minford, published by Penguin. The
Chinese translators give a fairly literal title: A Dream of Red Mansions; David Hawkes’ title
is The Story of the Stone, since the social semantics of the color red are held to be not
immediately the same (“happiness” in China; “danger” in English, grosso modo).22 A whole
tradition of translation criticism, mostly in China, therefore sees the Beijing translation as
being literalist and foreignizing, while the Penguin translation would be free and
domesticating, occasionally demonized as a neo-colonial appropriation of the Chinese
classic. This opposition invites arguments for all tastes. However, statistical analysis of actual
translation solutions shows that both translations mix foreignizing and domesticating
solutions, in different ways and in different but comparable proportions. For example, the
Buddhist term Bodhisattva 菩萨is domesticated in 31% of the occurrences in Hawkes and
Minford, and 28% in the Yangs’ version.23 What translators do is typically far richer and
complex than what is said about them.
Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the Western translation form is the very
fundamental separation of translations from what is considered “home” or “national”
production. Anthologies of national literatures generally do not include translations into the
national language, even though translations are one of the main ways in which literary
systems find renewal. Ezra Pound claimed that “a great age of literature is perhaps always a
great age of translations; or follows it.”24 Yet, as Pound also observed, translators are rarely
included in the national histories.25

19
The Germanic tradition of translation as Bildung is idealized in Antoine Berman, The Experience of the
Foreign. Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992).
20
Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens,” in Das Problem des
Übersetzens, edited by H. J. Störig (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 63; my translation.
21
Ibid.
22
Yang Xianxi and Gladys Yang, trans., A Dream of Red Mansions (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1994);
David Hawkes and John Minford, trans. The Story of the Stone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-1986).
23
Chen Shui-sheng, “Translation Ethics and Strategies of Religious Culture-loaded Words in Hong Lou
Meng,” Journal of Anqing Teachers College 10 (2010): 113-116.
24
Ezra Pound, “Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot
(New York: New Directions, 1954), 232.
25
See Alexandra Assis Rosa, “What about a Section on Translation in that Literary History Volume?
Readership, Literary Competence and Translation,” Current Writing 14 (2003): 175-191.

5
Ways of Talking about Translations

The great binarisms of the Western form have spawned a series of technical concepts that
help us talk about translations. Beyond the oppositions of “literal” vs. “free” or
“foreignizing” vs. “domesticating,” the following are common enough:

“Source” (or “start”) versus “target” languages/texts/cultures: It makes sense to talk

about “start” texts, at least to indicate that there are always sources prior to the one we
are translating. The alternative pair “guest language” vs. “host language” has been
formulated by Lydia Liu in her history of “translingual practices” in China.26 The start
vs. target nomenclature nevertheless makes more sense from the perspective of the
translator, which is the position that retains currency in European translation studies,
institutionally based on the training of translators.

Retranslation: As a translation of a text that has already been translated into the same
language, a retranslation may be “passive,” when it basically adjusts to changes in the
target language and literary preferences, or “active,” when it presents an alternative to
a contemporary translation, as would be the case of Hawkes and Minford’s version of
Hong Lou Meng. Retranslations have been hypothesized as becoming progressively
closer to the start text over history,27 although they could logically become freer, as
the temporal and cultural distance from the start culture grows. Once again, empirical
studies suggest that neither of the either/or hypotheses holds, since there are many
local factors, especially on the level of cultural policy, that override any historical
tendency.28

Indirect translation: A translation of a translation that has been done into another
language is thus “indirect,” as when Western texts reached Chinese in the late
nineteenth century via their translations into Japanese, or German and Scandinavian
texts reached Spanish through French translations. Hadley proposes that indirect
translations tend to be more domesticating than direct translations and are more
frequently presented as if they were not translations.29 The more distant the author,
the less restricted the translator, perhaps, yet the hypothesis merits the same caveat as
the retranslation hypothesis.

Pseudotranslation: A non-translational text may be presented as if it were a

translation, as in the cases of Ossian and Don Quijote (which the narrator claims is a
translation from Arabic). Such pseudotranslations tell us much about what translations
are expected to be in a particular time and place, although the reasons for them are
many and varied. There are cases where the claim to be a “mere” translator is a way
of avoiding persecution (Latin pseudotranslations from Arabic in the twelfth century
used this ploy to avoid accusations of heresy). There are many more cases where

26
Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China 1900-1937
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26.
27
The idea is in Goethe, Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans. Vol. 6
of Goethes Werke, edited by Sophie von Sachsen (Stuttgart and Tübingen, Cotta, 1819/1827), 237ff.
28
Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen, “A thousand and one translations: Revisiting retranslation,” in Claims,
Change and Challenges in Translation Studies, edited by Gyde Hansen, Kirsten Malmkjaer, and Daniel Gile
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004), 27-38.
29
James Hadley, “Indirect translation and discursive identity: Proposing the concatenation effect
hypothesis,” Translation Studies 10 (2017): 183-197

6
 writers seek to cash in on the prestige of the foreign: paperback Westerns written in
Hebrew claim to be translations from American-sounding authors, and science fiction
in Hungarian uses similar subterfuge.30 An age of pseudotranslations, where prestige
is given to a particular foreign culture, also tends to be an age of relatively
foreignizing translations.

Self-translation (sometimes “auto-translation”): A translation may be done by the

author of the start text. Since the Western form makes the fundamental division
between these two roles, it is meaningful to name instances where they are carried out
by the same person. Self-translations nevertheless tend to be remarkably free and
creative (Samuel Beckett is the prime example), since it is difficult to betray oneself.31

All these terms rest on the foundational pairs of the Western form. All of them can be
questioned as digital technologies remove the technological foundations of that form.

The Literariness of Literary Translation

The acceptance of literature as a separate field of translation practice appears remarkably

present historically albeit irregular in conceptualization. Most simply, literature is generally
associated with qualities of expressive resources, in a great many cultures. Literary
translation usually adopts that focus.
Dolet’s rules of 1540 included the need to attend to particular figures of speech (“les
nombres oratoires”), in part to ensure the translation is sweet and pleasing to the ear, but also
because translation from Latin to French (the prime example is Cicero) is still charged with
enriching the latter. Fictionality has little to do with the kind of texts concerned by such
precepts: oratory, philosophy, and essays configure the field where special attention is paid to
expression. Often this is done with a normative weight that is not infrequently dragged across
from the translation of religious texts: Jerome professed to translating “sense for sense” in
general, except for the sacred scripture, where “there is mystery in the very order of the
words.”32 Such source-based admonition was of little interest to d’Ablancourt, whose
translating would nevertheless be literary because of the rhetorical qualities of the target text
alone, yet something like it does operate in Schleiermacher, where the function of the
classical text is once again to help develop the target language. Schleiermacher actually
distinguishes his translation practice from that of Dolmetschen, normally rendered as
“(spoken) interpreting” but here applied to all situations where the text is globally a function
of “the matter at hand” (“auffassendes Organ des Gegenstandes”), bound to “the order of
space and time.”33 The immediately functional text is thus easy to translate, intimates
Schleiermacher, while the text that rises above immediate functionalism, in literature or
philosophy, concerns the mind or essence of a people and thus merits special attention to
expression.
The literariness of literary translation can thus play the game both ways, privileging
either side but always emphasizing the means of expression. Even in the tripartite

30
Gideon Toury, “Enhancing Cultural Changes by Means of Fictitious Translations,” in Translation and
Cultural Change: Studies in history, norms and image-projection, edited by Eva Hung (Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2005), 3–17.
31
See Anthony Cordingley, ed. Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013).
32
Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), “On the Best Kind of Translator” (Letter 57 to Pammachius), The Satirical
Letters of St. Jerome, translated and edited by Paul Carroll (Chicago: Gateway, 1958), 132-51.
33
Schleiermacher, “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens,” 62.

7
conceptualizations that inform a strand of Chinese translation theory since Yan Fu,34 the third
term, yǎ 雅, generally refers to the eloquence of the target language, which is a criterion not
just in fiction but in the translation of philosophy and essays as well (Yan Fu was translating
Huxley).
One consequence of this kind of literary frame is the idea of the unattainable original,
since different languages obviously have different means of expression. Dante used this
observation to denounce literary translation as impossible.35 Croce believed that literary
translations were only possible to a relative degree, “not as reproductions of the same original
expressions (which it would be vain to attempt) but as productions of similar expressions.”36
In literature, translators are apparently condemned to a lesser ontological status. Heidegger
was even more trenchant, harking back to Schleiermacher: “Translation is one thing with
respect to a business letter, and something quite different with respect to a poem. The letter is
translatable; the poem is not.”37 Walter Benjamin, in prefacing his own translations of
Baudelaire in 1923, concurs that the difficulty in literary translation is not what is said but
how it is said (“der Art des Meinens”),38 yet he resolves the apparent impossibility of
reproduction by simply stating that the task of the (literary) translator is not to communicate
the anterior text but to provide a complementary version, adding to its “afterlife” rather than
attempting to replace it. Writing slightly later than Benjamin, the Soviet Germanist Fedorov
similarly insisted that a literary translation cannot reproduce the original but instead offers “a
special understanding of the system of the original,” as one reading among many. The
translator, says the young Fedorov, thus implements a series of “deviations,” “violations,” or
“infringements” (нарушения) in order to attain “accuracy” (точность), in this case in the
rendition of Heine’s verse.39
Again, what literary translators actually do in practice tends to involve a much richer
range of expressive possibilities than some theorists foresee. In a seminal paper, the
American scholar James Holmes outlined four major treatments of verse, which we might see
as standing for all literary expression:40

Verse as prose: Foreign verse may be rendered as prose, as has long been the norm
for translations into French, in keeping with a tradition that protects its rhetorical
system from foreign influence. Baudelaire and Mallarmé both rendered Poe’s verse in
prose (with illustrations by Manet in the case of the latter), which helped European
literatures receive him as something more than the jingle-jangle ryhmer he has tended
to remain in English.

Mimetic form: The translator may choose a target-language resource that is as close as
possible as the one used in the source language, or existing solutions may be bent
towards the foreign one. This can introduce a new form into the target culture, as was
the case when English terza rima was modeled on Italian verse. The strategy

34
Yan Fu, xi.
35
Dante, Convivio 1,7, 14: “nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può de la sua loquela in altra
transmutare, sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia.”
36
Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as a Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie
(London: Noonday, 1902/1922), 73.
37
Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 163; my translation.
38
Walter Benjamin, 55.
39
Andrey V. Fedorov, “Проблема стихотворного перевода,” Poetika 2 (1927): 104-18. Translated as “The
Problem of Verse Translation,” Linguistics. An International Review 137 (1974): 13-29.
40
James S. Holmes, “Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form,” in The Nature of
Translation. Essays in the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, edited by James S. Holmes, Frans de
Haan, and Anton Popovič (The Hague and Paris: Mouton de Gruyter, 1970), 91-105.

8
 predominates when a literary culture is open to what it sees as prestigious outside
influences, as would be the case of translations into German in the first half of the
nineteenth century (including Schleiermacher’s).

Analogical form: The translator can use a target-side resource that has the same
function as the start-side mode of expression. The Iliad, for example, is an epic, so an
English translation might be in verse already used for epics in English: blank verse or
heroic couplets.41 This option is typical of literary cultures that consider themselves
more prestigious than the ones being translated from, as would generally be the case
in eighteenth-century in France.

Organic or content-derivative form: The translator may work solely from the content
of the start text, “allowing it to take on its own unique poetic shape as the translation
develops.”42 Holmes sees this attitude as being pessimistic about the possibility of
translation; he (unconvincingly) associates it with modernism.

There are further options to be found in history, usually with some mode of underlying
explanation in cross-cultural relations. Holmes actually adds the possibility of a translator
adopting a verse that is totally unconnected with the start text, since there are exceptions to
any rule. The one general tendency that underlies the historical observations is that the more
a culture accords prestige to a foreign culture, the more it tolerates foreignizing translations
from that culture.43 The important point, though, is that whereas Western theories have
tended to locate literary value in the expressive properties of one side or the other, actual
translation practice is working with rather more possibilities.

Who Translates?

In the past few decades, translator scholars have started to ask questions of a more
sociological bent, looking not just at translations but at who translators are. If one follows the
great theoretical binarisms, especially Schleiermacher’s exclusion of a cultural middle ground
between countries, one might expect all translators to belong to the target culture, and this is
indeed an unempirical normalizing assumption. At the same time, one could logically expect
translators to be recruited from among people who physically move between cultures, if only
because they are typically proficient speakers of foreign languages.
The assumption that the translator belongs to one or the other side deserves to be
questioned, along with all the other corollaries of binarism. To take the example of the
Chinese and English translators of Hong Lou Meng, it would not be entirely correct to situate
them wholly on one side or the other. The Oxford scholars David Hawkes and John Minford
learned much of their Chinese in China, while Yang Xianxi studied classics at Oxford, where
he met his British wife Gladys, who had been born in China as a daughter of missionaries.
Some historical trends similarly question assumptions of axiomatic belonging. For instance,
many translators into Spanish over the past centuries have worked from outside of Spain
thanks to a cyclical history of cultural expulsions. In many cases they turned to translation

41
Holmes, 95.
42
Holmes, 96.
43
Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond, 307, working from Itamar Even-Zohar, “The
position of translated literature within the literary polysystem,” Literature and Translation. New Perspectives in
Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes et al. (Leuven: Acco, 1978), 117-127.

9
because it is one of the few jobs that an exile can easily do.44 As Jacob Blakesley puts it when
searching for a sociology of poetry translation, “there is no one-to-one identity between
language and nationality.”45
Another common misapprehension is that translation is the stuff of professionals who
have no other job. In the case of literary translation, the more general trend is quite the
opposite. A study of early twentieth-century British translators from Spanish, for example,
finds little evidence of full-time translators46: this is world of part-timers, including young
writers who, notes Callahan, “want to do almost anything to penetrate the literary world and
to make a living from literary activity.”47 Although the lists of complementary activities are
long, literary translators are typically teachers of language and literature or work in
publishing in some way.48
This principle of pluri-employment is important. First, it enables translators to draw
social and economic capital from non-literary spheres, which means that much translating
need not be economically subservient to the criteria of commercial publishing, for example.
Many translations are indeed done for the love of art. Second, it means that much of the
literary translation field is structured in terms of relative penury: a 2008 study found that the
income of literary translators in most countries in Europe is between 40 and 67 percent of
what an industrial worker earns.49 Third, as a consequence of this, effective payment for
much literary translating comes from the translators’ other jobs, especially academic
employment. Indeed, one of the main ways in which university language departments
efficiently contribute to their surrounding societies is through literary translations, which
consequently deserve to be recognized as legitimate research outputs.50
Adopting this wider view of translative activity, researchers have started to
investigate the degree to which translations are often the products of collaborative group
work. This was common enough in medieval translations but tended to be hidden by the
precepts of Renaissance individualism, where the active roles played by printers and other
translators can nevertheless be uncovered.51 Empirical studies can also trace the active role of
copy-editors in literary translations, for example.52

Translation flows and the three-percent problem

One can roughly map the numbers of translations into and from different languages. For each
translation, there is a “start” language and a “target” language, although major texts tend to

44
Marcos Rodríguez Espinosa, “La traducción como forma de exilio,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (1998): 83-
94.
45
Jacob S. D. Blakesley, A sociological approach to poetry translation (London and New York: Routledge,
2019), 11.
46
David Callahan, “Material Conditions for Reception. Spanish Literature in England 1920-1940,” New
Comparison 15 (1993), 100-109.
47
Callahan, 104.
48
See Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), chapter 10
“Translators.”
49
Holger Fock, Martin de Haan, and Alena Lhotová, Comparative Income of Literary Translators in Europe
(Brussels: Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires, 2008), 69.
50
See the online petition “Translation as Research: A Manifesto,” Modern Languages Open (2015).
DOI: http://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.80
51
See Belen Bistué, Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014).
52
See, for example, Kristina Solum, “The tacit influence of the copy-editor in literary translation,”
Perspectives. Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 26 (2018): 1-17.

10
be translated from a pivot language into several others (resulting in indirect translations).
One-directional sets of such movements constitute translation flows.
The bibliographic databases for calculating flows are notoriously variable, and the
one database that covered a very broad range of languages—UNESCO’s Index
Translationum—is reported as having been discontinued around 201553 (chronological
searches tend not to give results later than 2000). Work on national databases nevertheless
consistently shows the various flows as being increasingly organized around English as a
central hub language, with other formerly colonial languages operating as lesser hubs. This
configuration is apparently as true of literary translations as it is of the languages used on
Twitter networks and Wikipedia.54 Translations tend to move from the more central
languages to the more peripheral languages,55 which means that the ratio of translations to
non-translations would be about 3 to 4 percent for English, while it can be 15 to 18 percent
for France, 11 to 14 for Germany, some 25 for Italy, 25 to 26 for Spain.56 It would thus seem
that English suffers from a dearth of translations, while less central cultures are relatively
swamped by translations. The flows could thus be promoting an inward-looking literary
culture in the center, and a loss of voice on the periphery, in a hegemonic relationship that
has been denounced as the “three percent problem” (since translations would account for only
three percent of the titles published in English).57
Several caveats are necessary. First, simple arithmetic can tell us that, if translation is
performed at a constant rate all over the world, the language with the most texts in it will be
the language with the most texts exported from it, and it will also be the language with the
lowest ratio of translations to non-translations.58 The “three percent” of translations in
English is thus mathematically normal, more or less, since a huge number of books are
published in English. Second, the diversity and vitality that many languages receive through
translation is, in the case of English, also likely to come from the wide range of cultural
contexts and postcolonial countries in which the language is used, without translation.59 So
the center is perhaps not entirely impoverished.
That said, there are signs of more worrying imbalances. Statistical analysis finds that
the more central a language is in the global networks, the more probable it is that the cultural
content in that language will gain “global popularity:” a writer in English is more likely to
find a wider audience through translation than is a writer in Indonesian, for example. This
means that a great many of the smaller and non-European languages effectively struggle to

53
Rüdiger Wischenbart, Miha Kovac, and Yana Genova, Diversity Report 2016 (Vienna: Verein für kulturelle
Transfers, 2016).
54
Shahar Ronen et al., “Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): E5616-E5622.
55
Abram de Swaan, Words of the World: The Global Language System (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Johan
Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro, “Outline for a sociology of translation: Current issues and future prospects,” in
Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2007), 93-107.
56
Statistics for the period 1985 to 1992, from Valérie Ganne and Marc Minon, “Géographies de la traduction,”
Traduire l’Europe, edited by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq (Paris: Payot, 1992), 55-95.
57
Chad D. Post, The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future
of Reading (Rochester: Open Letter, 2011).
58
Victor Ginsbergh and Shlomo Weber, How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic
Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
59
Anthony Pym and Grzegorz Chrupała, “The quantitative analysis of translation flows in the age of an
international language,” in Less Translated Languages, edited by Albert Branchadell and Lovell Margaret West
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), 27-38.

11
find a literary voice in the global translation flows, although Beecroft notes the partial
exceptions of Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.60
As the study of indirect translations shows, the global configuration of a central hub
language as a “pivot” or “clearinghouse” for translations has been happening for some time,
through Latin, French, and German in the West, prior to the rise of English. Passage through
the central languages is not just a matter of finding translators who know the languages. It is
also the creation of literature as an event, not just in book fairs and the like but as a more
general sense of “what is happening,” associated with a centralized modernity, and
consequently the use of translations outward from the center in order to extend literary
fame.61 This configuration would seem to fit in with Casanova’s portrayal of a “world literary
system,” where passage through the center is required for an author or genre to gain
“consecration,” as Bourdieu found with respect to the role of Paris in French publishing.62
Casanova’s sociology is nevertheless based on lists of names rather than calculated flows,
resulting in a center-periphery binarism that is easily questioned by alternative lists of names.
And for that matter, Bourdieu’s study of the French literary system identified not only “best-
seller” translations published in the Parisian center but also numerous “boutique” translations
being carried out and published by small companies in Provence, often from more peripheral
languages – once again, many translations are done for more than economic reasons.63 In the
same way, one finds that the global flows include regional exchanges that are not directly in
need of filtering by a central language.
In some circumstances, peripheral networks can emerge to serve the cause of regional
promotion. Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, for instance, finds translations from a wider “Balkans” in
the Turkish literary journal Varlık in the 1930s and 1940s,64 as well as traces of exchanges
between Turkish and Slovenian, as two peripheral languages.65 Or again, Alexandra Assis
Rosa finds that literary translations into Portuguese were predominantly from French at the
beginning of the twentieth century but were then from Spanish, which was by no means in a
central systemic position at the time. Those translations responded in part to the convenience
of the Portuguese being able to draw on an equally repressive fascist state, where translations
had been ideologically vetted. The actual texts, though, show that the predominant genres
were “crime, mystery, detective, and western,” with a surprising number of English-sounding
pseudonyms being used by Spanish writers. Despite the quantitative flow, the qualitative
hegemony was still that of English-language genres.
The great challenge to the early twenty-first-century configuration of translation
networks is certainly to ensure the possibility of movements between minor or peripheral
literatures, without obligatory passage through the central languages. At the same time, facile
criticism of central cultures as somehow not having translations or not paying attention to
them is countered by the evidence. Perhaps the two languages most guilty of colonial
expansion and imperialist imposition, English and French, both have very high numbers of

60
Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Verso,
2015).
61
André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992).
62
Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999); trans. M. B. Debevoise, The
World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
63
Pierre Bourdieu, “Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
126-127 (1999): 3-28.
64
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, “Periodical Codes and Translation: An analysis of Varlık in 1933-1946,” Translation
and Interpreting Studies, forthcoming (2019).
65
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar and Nike Pokorn, “Translational and cultural exchange between two cultures pushed
to global periphery,” Across Languages and Cultures 14 (2013): 163–166. See also the online journal mTm
(Minor Translating Major, Major Translating Minor, Minor Translating Minor), http://www.mtmjournal.gr.

12
in-translations (albeit low percentages, since they themselves produce many titles). And they
now appear to be the languages with the most complete written histories of the translations
they have received.66

Translation Policies

Translation flows do not always depend on unfettered market forces. These days they
certainly have much to do with the global publishing forces that privilege international
bestsellers, variously countered by hidden armies of small publishers and underpaid
translators who seek a counter-circulation of literary value. In between those two, however,
there is a level at which public institutions intervene.
In the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, quite massive numbers of literary
translations were carried on the basis of official policy, initially in order to inherit bourgeois
culture (the World Literature series initiated by Gorky translated 120 titles by the mid 1950s),
then to maintain non-Russian languages and cultures, and finally to cultivate a shared
revolutionary identity with workers’ struggles around the world. The United States timidly
countered with its Franklin Book Programs, having American fiction and non-fiction
translated into the languages of countries it thought were susceptible to its democratic
values.67 The program folded in 1978, in part because of revelation that it had received
indirect financing from the CIA.
Despite the Soviet example, translation policy tends to concern international image
building more than it has anything to do with domestic language regimes. Most non-central
countries seek to export what they consider their representative texts as much as possible; a
few others, notably France, subsidize translations into national languages. A translation from
Catalan into French, for example, can seek official subsidies from the Catalan, Spanish, and
French governments; a translation in the other direction, from French into Catalan, can opt
for none. In other situations, translational exchanges between relatively peripheral languages
like Polish and Dutch have been successfully promoted by grants and subsidies, in line with
both specific national policies and the interests of publishers.68
National translation policies also impinge upon who translates, particularly in cultures
where literature plays a key role in the symbolism of national identity. Koreans are
notoriously obsessed that they have not been crowned with a Nobel Prize, and part of their
blame falls on foreign translators. China’s translation policy is designed more carefully as an
instrument of international diplomacy, exporting cultural values in its quest for “soft
power.”69 Like Korea, Chinese policymakers are loath to trust foreign translators with their
literary heritage, with the result that much of the emphasis on translator training in China is to
ensure that Chinese texts are rendered by trusted Chinese translators who work into foreign
languages.

66
Peter France and Stuart Gillespie, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. 5 volumes
(Oxford University Press, 2005-); Yves Chevrel and Jean-Yves Masson, eds. Histoire des traductions en langue
française. 4 volumes (Paris: Verdier, 2012-). Both series have strangely long delays for their twentieth-century
volumes.
67
Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, “The Cultural Cold War and the Circulation of Literature. Insights from the
Franklin Book Programs in Teheran,” Journal of World Literature 1 (2016): 371 – 390.
68
Wischenbart et al., 42.
69
See, for example, Wu You, “Globalization, translation and soft power. A Chinese perspective,” Babel 63/4
(2017): 463-485.

13
Discussion of the Literature

The long history of writing on translation is marked by repeated facile opinions based on
spurious categories and little evidence. For Theodore Savory, “there are no universally
accepted principles of translation, because the only people who are qualified to formulate
them have never agreed among themselves, but have so often and for so long contradicted
each other that they have bequeathed to us a volume of confused thought which must be hard
to parallel in other fields of literature.”70 This is as true of the Western dichotomies as it is of
Yan Fu’s three principles, for example, which in any case gave way to binaries in China
following the May the Fourth period.71 The tedium has only briefly been broken by
Fedorov’s insistence on “adequacy” (адекватність) as an organic balance of competing
criteria applicable to different parts of the work,72 and much later by Meschonnic’s repeated
assertion that what counts in sacred and literary translation is the rhythm of the text (neither
the signifier nor the signified). Both those figures nevertheless became embroiled in further
political binarisms: Fedorov has long been denounced as a form-fixated “linguist” by the
“artistic” Russian translators who follow the opposed tradition of Kashkin, while Meschonnic
willfully opposed the universal regime of the sign—that is, more or less everyone else—with
no argument beyond his own translative practice, deploying what Richard Sieburth has justly
described as “police actions against the hapless victims of his exegetical wrath.”73
The recycled debates were nevertheless partly put on hold by the development of
translation studies as an empirical discipline bringing together linguistics and literature, first
mooted in the Soviet Union in 195874 then developed in eastern and western Europe, Israel,
and Canada. In multilingual countries that depend on translation for their governance,
translation is more than a question of opinion: translators need to be trained, universities have
taken on the training, and the institutional basis has thus been laid for something passably
different. Rather than discuss the merits of one approach or the other, linguists and literary
scholars set about researching what translators actually do. This essentially descriptive
approach has significantly broadened academic awareness of the rich diversity of translation
practices, throughout history and across cultures. Of course, the discipline has been marked
by regular tussles between linguistic and cultural considerations, to the extent that a “cultural
turn” announced in the early 1990s75 could pretend to be something new, and there have been
almost annual “turns” since then. Yet the fundamental principle of checking pronouncements
against data has remained, even if increasingly in the form of a plodding empiricism for
empiricism’s sake. Driven by training and then by the global rise in translation activity, the
growth of translation studies as a hybrid discipline became a success story of the late
twentieth century.
Something rather different has happened in countries that do not depend on
translation for their governance. In the United States, translator training long remained a
marginal activity, allowing the study of translation to be picked up by literature departments.
Particularly in comparative or world literature, a heavily theorized discourse on translation

70
Savory, 49-50.
71
Leo Tak Hung Chan, “What's modern in Chinese translation theory? Lu Xun and the debates on literalism
and foreignization in the May Fourth period,” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 14 (2001): 195-223.
72
Andrey V. Fedorov, Введение в теорию перевода [Introduction to the theory of translation] (Moscow:
Literatury na inostrannykh yazykakh, 1953), 114.
73
Richard Sieburth, “Review of Antoine Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne,” The
Translator 6 (2000): 323.
74
Edmond Cary, “Andréi Fédorov. Introduction à la théorie de la traduction,” Babel 5 (1959): 19n.
75
Lefevere, André and Susan Bassnett, “Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights
- The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Translation Studies,” in Translation, History and Culture, edited by Susan Bassnett and
André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990), 1-13.

14
has helped reinvent literary studies, at the same time as it plays on translation as one of the
practical things that literature graduates can do. In a context of poor language skills among
students, it might be meaningful to criticize the use of translations when teaching literature,
especially when translations are blithely assumed to replace foreign texts.76 The answer to
that “translatability” debate was nevertheless formulated many decades ago, when Benjamin
and Fedorov argued that translations do not replace texts but rather add readings to them. The
challenge, in the teaching situation, must be to incorporate multiple variant translations into
teaching practice, and to use them in ways that make that plurality productive, returning to
and drawing out from the foreign text.
If the binarisms of Western thought on translation can be associated with the fixity of
the printing press, they stand a good chance of being undone by the temporality and
accessibility of digital technologies, which in some respects return us to the patterns of pre-
print communication.77 This is an aspect about which relatively little is known and much
exploration and experimenting remains to be done. In our teaching, translating, and work on
translation, more attention needs to be paid not just to the coming of age of accessible and
playful machine translation, and not just to the wider worlds that still exist beyond the
Western form, but even more so to the roles of sound, image, and movement, to intersemiotic
translation, in making literature new.

Links to Digital Materials

Despite commendable printed catalogues and histories of translations into major languages,
translation scholars have been relatively slow to make digital databases available online. The
search for literary translations might start from online lists such as the notoriously irregular
Index Translationum, then draw on publishers’ online catalogues, and still find further
translations listed in online vendor portals.78

European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations. Contains links to projects that work
on translation statistics and the working conditions of literary translators.

Index Translationum. A list of translated works compiled from reports from more than 100
countries, in electronic form since 1979. The database is irregular and is reported as having
been discontinued around 2015.

Literature Across Frontiers. A European platform that aims to develop intercultural dialogue
through literature and translation, highlighting less translated literatures. Contains reports on
translation flows into English, especially from Mediterranean languages.

Renaissance Cultural Crossroads. A catalogue of all translations out of and into all languages
printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1641. It also includes all translations out of
all languages into English printed abroad before 1641.

Svenskt översättarlexikon. A source of biographical data on translators into Swedish.

76
Emily Apter, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).
77
Anthony Pym, “The medieval postmodern in Translation Studies,” in And Translation Changed the World
(and the World Changed Translation), edited by Alberto Fuertes and Ester Torres-Simón (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 105-123.
78
See Sandra Poupaud, Anthony Pym and Ester Torres-Simón, “Finding translations. On the use of
bibliographical databases in translation history,” Meta 54 (2009): 264-278.

15
The Global Language Network. Contains the data used for the statistical analysis of book
translation flows in Shahar Ronen et al., “Links that speak” (2014).

The Translation Database. Founded in 2008 by Three Percent and Open Letter Books at the
University of Rochester to track all original publications of fiction and poetry published in
the U.S. in English translation.

Translations Database. More than 20,000 translated Dutch works, compiled by the Dutch
Foundation for Literature.

Further Reading

Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. Third edition. London & New York: Routledge, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften,

50-62. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977.

Berman, Antoine. L’épreuve de l'étranger: culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne

romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin. Paris:
Gallimard, 1984.

Brower, Reuben A. ed. On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

Chevrel, Yves, and Jean-Yves Masson, eds. Histoire des traductions en langue française. 4
vols. Paris: Verdier, from 2012.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. Ideational labor and the production of social energy. Intellectuals, Idea
Makers and Culture Entrepreneurs. Tel Aviv: The Culture Research Lab, 2016.

France, Peter, and Stuart Gillespie, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in
English. 5 volumes. Oxford University Press, from 2005.

Hermans, Theo, ed. Translating Others. 2 volumes. Manchester: St Jerome, 2006.

Holmes, James S. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

Khan, Tariq, ed. History of Translation in India. Mysuru: National Translation Mission,
2017.

Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and
New York: Routledge.

Meschonnic, Henri. Pour la poétique II. Épistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la

traduction. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post Structuralism and the Colonial
Context, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

16
Robinson, Douglas. The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991.

Robinson, Douglas, ed. The Pushing Hands of Translation and Its Theory. London and
Singapore: Routledge, 2016.

Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and cultural nationalism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Scott, Clive. The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018.

Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Revised edition.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Washbourne, Kelly, and Ben Van Wyke, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Literary
Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

17