ABSTRACT

The exponential growth of translation studies over the past two decades has led to a parallel growth in textbooks designed specifically for the field. This chapter provides a necessarily selective review of textbooks for use in translation-oriented courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The review is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular type of textbook: readers, primers, reference works, and manuals. The goal throughout is to examine how these texts construct a relationship between theory and practice and what kinds of research and translating they enable. Douglas Robinson's Western Translation Theory overlaps with Schulte and Biguenet's volume to some extent but actually presents a very different selection of materials. Intended primarily for courses on the history of translation theory, it moves from antiquity to the nineteenth century and brings together texts by ninety authors, nine of whom are women.