ABSTRACT
In a recent entry in the State of the Discipline Report of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Brigitte Rath delivered a strong plea for the discipline to reckon with pseudotranslation as one of the “Ideas of the Decade” (Rath 2014). Indicating that the term only fairly recently arrived on the scene of literary criticism, and that it still suffers somewhat from a lack of terminological stability (it competes with terms such as “fictitious translation,” “supposed translation,” and “original translation”), Rath firmly establishes the term as relevant for the study of (world) literature today:
Foregrounding a text’s imaginary origin in a different culture . . . stresses the conjecture and transnational imagination that is always involved in reading a text as world literature. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has also much to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship, authenticity, and multilingualism.
