A Critical Primer on Translation

The Centre for European and Eurasian Research (CREE) at INALCO is pleased to announce the publication of a book by Alexis Nouss, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov and Louis Watier, A Critical Primer on Translation published by AMU.

Presentation text

This Abécédaire challenges conventional wisdom about translation and asserts that translating is a creative endeavour with significant social, cultural and political implications.

This Primer does not deal with translation but with the act of translating, an act that presupposes a subject, a social context and a historical dimension. It aims to examine, from a critical perspective, concepts and notions often addressed by traditional translation studies, whilst also uncovering others that have been overlooked by the discipline. One of its aims is to challenge clichés about the practice of translation (‘a fluid translation’, ‘a language that flows’, ‘untranslatable poetry’…) which have become so transparent that their retrograde, even reactionary, nature is no longer recognised. A philosophy of translation will lie at the intersection of various disciplines – literary criticism, comparative literature, poetics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, law, theology and linguistics – as evidenced by the diverse backgrounds of the contributors, who include academics, researchers, translators and writers. As translation is plural, this plurality is preserved in the entries (variety of tones, styles, approaches, languages, sources and references). The sole imperative here is a critical, rather than encyclopaedic, approach that does not reproduce the various tenets of traditional translation studies, nor its scientism. Faced with the rise of AI and the threats its use poses to the recognition and practice of professional translation, this Primer offers a fully critical perspective that does not hide behind claims of neutrality, but affirms the inseparable link between the practice of translation and its cultural and political implications.

Authors

• Alexis Nouss is Professor Emeritus of General and Comparative Literature at Aix-Marseille University.
• Marie Vrinat-Nikolov is a literary translator and a lecturer in Bulgarian language and literature, as well as in
  translation theory at INALCO.
• Louis Watier is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès.