What is Translation?

In What is Translation? Douglas Robinson investigates the present state of translation studies and looks ahead to the exciting new directions in which he sees the field moving. Reviewing the work of such theorists as Frederick Rener, Rita Copeland, Eric Cheyfitz, Andre Lefevere, Anthony Pym, Suzanne Jill Levine, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Philip E. Lewis, he both celebrates and critiques the last decade’s work. Since the mid-eighties, long-held ideas in translation scholarship have undergone dramatic revision, and Douglas Robinson has been a major figure in this transformation. A leader in a rapidly emerging “American” school of humanist/literary translation theory, he combines historical and literary scholarship with a highly personal, often anecdotal, style. “Robinson’s thinking about translation has always been extraordinarily original…In What is Translation? [he] continues to defy traditional conceptual thinking about translation….Many of the questions Robinson raises will have implications for the future development of the field of translation studies as well as repercussions beyond,” writes Edwin Gentzler in his foreword to the book.

Biography

Douglas Robinson (b. 1954) was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and grew up in the LA and Seattle areas. After an exchange year in Finland in 1971-1972, he did two years of undergraduate work at Linfield College and the Evergreen State College, and then returned to Finland, taking three degrees and teaching full-time as “the American lecturer” in the English department at the University of Jyvaskyla before returning in 1981 to the US to do a doctorate in English at the University of Washington (Seattle). Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1983, he accepted an assistant professorship in American Language and Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland, and was appointed to that post permanently in 1987; he then spent two years as an assistant professor of English-Finnish Translation Theory and Practice at the same university, before accepting a professorship in English at the University of Mississippi in 1989.

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