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Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility explores the issues involved in translation between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as from these languages into European languages, with an eye to comparing the cultures of translation within East Asia and tracking some of their complex interrelationships.
This book reasserts the need for a paradigm shift in translation theory that looks beyond European languages and furthers existing work in this field by encompassing a wider range of literature and scholarship in East Asia.
Translation and Literature in East Asia brings together material dedicated to the theory and practice of translation between and from East Asian languages for the first time.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: Making Classical Chinese Literature Contemporary: Translation 'between centre and absence'
Chapter Two: Layered translations: glossing, adaptation, and the reception of Bai Juyi's poetry in premodern Japan
Chapter Three: Translating invisibility: the case of Korean-English literary translation
Index
About the author
Jieun Kiaer is an associate professor in Korean Language and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, UK.
Jennifer Guest is an associate professor in Japanese at the University of Oxford, UK.
Xiaofan Amy Li is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, UK.
Summary
Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility explores the issues involved in translation between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as from these languages into European languages
Report
Through specialist case studies from pre-modern China and Japan as well as contemporary Korea, the authors are able to make a number of highly original claims that not only finely nuance some conceptual dichotomies in literary translation (e.g. visibility vs. invisibility, domestication vs. foreignization), but also modify and challenge our conventional (and predominantly Western?) assumption of literary translation as primarily a one-directional and single modal exercise of meaning conveyance. Importantly, a good amount of the material in the book stresses the mode- or medium-sensitive interaction and translation among East Asian languages (e.g. varied presentation format that blurs the boundary between translation and commentary, creole-like co-appearance of logographs and phonetic script). This volume stands thus as an exemplary addition to the promising new book series 'Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation', of which two of the co-authors now serve as the editors.
-- Shuangyi Li (2021) Book review: Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23306343.2021.1877959
