ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the ethical stakes of authorship and exchange as translators deal with translation’s parameters in a world in turmoil amid forces of postcolonialism and globalism. It examines untranslatability from the nuts-and-bolts pragmatics of translation. Alfred Mac Adam’s “Pragmatic Translation” locates the origins of translation in the idea of exchange. Equivalency has been a central dilemma of translation, and whether argued by linguistics or translation theorists, the question of equivalency may be most profitably approachable and elucidated in discussion on a case by case basis. Within modern poetics, Proust is a canonical subject, which however Dominique Jullien contemporizes with her discussion of Lydia Davis’s new translation. Gauti Kristmannsson suggests that the fields of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies need to find a more harmonious discursive space, and hence to recognize how they are dealing—via complementary perspectives—with the same dynamic and creative process.
