Product details
- ISBN 9781032017709
- Weight: 420g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 May 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the age of big data, evidence keeps suggesting that small, elusive and infrequent details make all the difference in our appreciation of humanistic texts—film, fiction, and philosophy. This book argues, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, that expertise in humanistic translation is precisely the capacity to capture those details that are bigger than they seem. In humanistic translation, the expert handling of big details usually serves audiences and the original, but mala fide translation also works the details for subtle manipulation and audience deception. A focus on textual detail is therefore characteristic of humanistic translators but also compatible with central claims of the cultural turn in translation studies. This book, written by a scholar and teacher of literary, essayistic, and audiovisual translation, endeavors to articulate a seemingly dual interest—on textual detail and cultural analysis—as a single one. It theorizes connections between micro and macro analysis, between translation as detail and translation as culture, thus hoping to build bridges between humanistic translators and translation scholars. It acknowledges tensions between practice and theory and proposes a way forward: practitioners and scholars share ways of thinking—varieties of "part-whole thinking"—that machines can never acquire.
Jeroen Vandaele teaches literary translation and Hispanic literatures at Ghent University, Belgium. From 2008 until 2017 he was professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo (Norway), teaching translation theory and cognitive poetics. He has been a scholar and teacher of translation since the late 1990s.
