Douglas Robinson

الترجمة والإمبراطورية

Ellen Gardiner

Not only examining the writings of a critically neglected American novelist of the early 20th century, this study also uses Ring Lardner both as the basis for a theoretical inquiry into language and literature, and as a study of men and masculinity at the turn of the century.

Ring Lardner and the Other

Just as a long discussion with Doug Robinson is the shortest way toward conceptualizing innovative approaches in Translation Studies, so reading a new book of his is a mindexpanding experience. This definitely holds true for this book, in which he undertakes an impressive attempt to retheorize semiotranslation. One of its many intellectual merits is that he fundamentally questions our habitualized, sometimes idealized, assumptions. The author himself mentions that he loves the periphery. But some of his ideas are so central to the phenomenon of translation that they make us feel the need for a humble Semiotic Turn in Translation Studies.

Semiotranslating Peirce

This user-friendly introduction to a new ‘performative’ methodology in linguistic pragmatics breaks away from the traditional approach which understands language as a machine. Drawing on a wide spectrum of research and theory from the past thirty years in particular, Douglas Robinson presents a combination of ‘action-oriented approaches’ from sources such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. Paying particular attention to language as drama, the group regulation of language use, individual resistance to these regulatory pressures and nonverbal communication, the work also explains groundbreaking concepts and analytical models. With a key points section, discussion questions and exercises in every chapter, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and teachers on a variety of courses, including linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication.

Introducing Performative Pragmatics

What can Finland’s greatest and supposedly least translatable novel tell us about translation and world literature?

Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)translatability

Translating the Monster

A Study

John Barth's Giles Goat-boy

Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers. Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and zhi, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of many books, including Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason, also published by SUNY Press.

A Somatic Guide

The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle

In this book, Douglas Robinson introduces a new distinction between 'constative' and 'performative' linguistics, arguing that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies. Constative linguistics, Robinson suggests, includes methodologies aimed at 'freezing' language as an abstract sign system, while performative linguistics explores how language is used or 'performed' in those speech situations. Robinson then tests his hypothesis on the act of translation. Drawing on a range of language scholars and theorists, Performative Linguistics consolidates the many disparate action-approaches to language into a new paradigm for the study of language.

Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words

Performative Linguistics

Both a comparative study of Russian and German literary-theoretical history and an insightful examination of the somatics of literature, this groundbreaking work provides a deeper understanding of how literature affects the reader and offers a new perspective on present-day problems in poststructuralist approaches to the human condition.

Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht

Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature

This book applies frameworks from behavioral economics to Western thinking about translation, mapping four approaches to eight keywords in translation studies to bring together divergent perspectives on the study of translation and interpreting. The volume takes its points of departure from the tensions between the concerns of behavioral and neoclassical economists. The book considers on one side behavioral economists’ interest in the predictable irrationality of “Humans” and its nuances as they unfold in terms of gender, here organized around Masculine Human, Feminine Human, and Queer perspectives, and on the other side neoclassical economists’ chief concerns with the unfailing rationality of the “Econs.” Robinson applies these four approaches across eight chapters, each representing a keyword in the study of translation—agency; difference; Eurocentrism; hermeneutics; language; norms; rhetoric; and world literature—with case studies that problematize the different categories. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive treatment of the behavioral economics of translation and promotes new ways of thinking in the study of translation and interpreting, making it of interest to scholars in the discipline as well as those working along interdisciplinary lines in related fields such as philosophy, literature, and political science.

The Behavioral Economics of Translation

This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of translational priming research. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter, a module in the brain’s left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their world based on available evidence—and, where no evidence is available, primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming. Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting studies.

Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors

Priming Translation

Harold Dick

Drawing on the extensive photographs, notes, diaries, reports, recorded data, and manuals he collected during his five years at the Zeppelin Company in Germany, from 1934 through 1938, Harold G. Dick tells the story of the two great passenger Zeppelins. Against the background of German secretiveness, especially during the Nazi period, Dick's accumulation of material and pictures is extraordinary. His original photographs and detailed observations on the handling and flying of the two big rigids constitute the essential data on this phase of aviation history.

Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg

The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships

M. Frey

Low-Grade Metamorphism explores processes and transformations in rocks during the early stages of metamorphic recrystallization. There has been little analysis and documentation of this widespread phenomenon, especially of the substantial and exciting advances that have taken place in the subject over the last decade. This book rectifies that shortfall, building on the foundations of Low-Temperature Metamorphism by Martin Frey (1987). The editors have invited contributions from an internationally acknowledged team of experts, who have aimed the book at advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the field. Contributions from internationally acknowledged experts. Documents the substantial and exciting advances that have taken place in the subject over the last decade.

Low-Grade Metamorphism

This book offers an introduction for Translation Studies (TS) scholars to Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation spearheaded by Sakai Naoki and Lydia H. Liu, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. According to Sakai, intralingual translation is primal: we are all foreigners to each other, making every address to another "heterolingual", thus a form of translation; and it is the order that these acts of translation bring to communication that begins to generate the "two separate languages" scenario. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario. In three sets of "Critical Theses on Translation," the book outlines and explains (and partly critiques) the CTS approach; in five interspersed chapters, the book delves more deeply into CTS, with an eye to making it do work that will be useful to TS scholars.

Critical Translation Studies

One of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter's notion of strange loops, from Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter's strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is.

The Strange Loops of Translation

Patricia Desiderio

Your husband died. Guess what? His death was just the beginning. This guidebook charts a path through the first two years (or so) of your journey. This is the worst experience of your life (probably). You don't have to figure everything out on your own. Written by a widow specifically for other widows - she's already walked that mile. Co-authored by a financial advisor who actually works with widows on a constant basis. This guidebook opens your eyes to the unique experiences of widowhood. It lets you know what questions to ask, what to be aware of, what needs to get done and when.Our guidebook reinforces the idea that you are woman with her own identity above and beyond being a widow. You are not just a widow. It will take time to redefine yourself. We think our guidebook can help you get there a little quicker with less stress. Welcome to the club no one wants to be a member of - the sisterhood of widows. The least we can do is try to make a tough time a little easier.

A Widow's Guide to Surviving Her New Reality and Transforming Into Her New Self

The Not Just a Widow Guidebook

Exploring this theme, Robinson examines Plato's Ion, Philo Judaeus and Augustine on the Septuagint, Paul on inspired interpreters, Joseph Smith on the Book of Mormon, and Schleiermacher, Marx, and Heidegger on translation. He traces the imaginative and historical linkages between twentieth-century conceptions of ideology and ancient conceptions of spirit-channeling, and the performative inversion of power relations by which the "channel" (or translator) comes to wield the source author as his or her tool.

Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason

Who Translates?

This innovative book integrates translation theory and the practical skills required by the working translator.

An Accelerated Course

Becoming A Translator

Finalist for the 2020 Prose Awards (Language and Linguistics Category) The emergence of transgender communities into the public eye over the past few decades has brought some new understanding, but also renewed outbreaks of violent backlash. In Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address Douglas Robinson seeks to understand the “translational” or “translingual” dialogues between cisgendered and transgendered people. Drawing on a wide range of LGBT scholars, philosophers, sociologists, sexologists, and literary voices, Robinson sets up cis-trans dialogues on such issues as “being born in the wrong body,” binary vs. anti-binary sex/gender identities, and the nature of transition and transformation. Prominent voices in the book include Kate Bornstein, C. Jacob Hale, and Sassafras Lowrey. The theory of translation mobilized in the book is not the traditional equivalence-based one, but Callon and Latour's sociology of translation as “speaking for someone else,” which grounds the study of translation in social pressures to conform to group norms. In addition, however, Robinson translates a series of passages from Finnish trans novels into English, and explores the “translingual address” that emerges when those English translations are put into dialogue with cis and trans scholars.

Douglas Robinson

About

Books

Join the club