Overview

"The Dao of Translation sets up an East-West dialogue on the nature of language and translation, and specifically on the ""unknown forces"" that shape the act of translation. To that end it mobilizes two radically different readings of the Daodejing (formerly romanized as the Tao Te Ching): the traditional ""mystical"" reading according to which the Dao is a mysterious force that cannot be known, and a more recent reading put forward by Sinologists Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, to the effect that the Dao is simply the way things happen. Key to Ames and Hall’s reading is that what makes the Dao seem both powerful and mysterious is that it channels habit into action—or what the author calls social ecologies, or icoses. The author puts Daoism (and ancient Confucianism) into dialogue with nineteenth-century Western theorists of the sign, Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure (and their followers), in order to develop an ""icotic"" understanding of the tensions between habit and surprise in the activity of translating. The Dao of Translation will interest linguists and translation scholars. This book will also engage researchers of ancient Chinese philosophy and provide Western scholars with a thought-provoking cross-examination of Eastern and Western perspectives."

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9780367133801

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This book is a genuine contribution to translation studies in an age of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism. ... it introduces insightful ideas from semiotics, ancient Chinese philosophy, neuroscience and psychology into translation studies. Robinson wishes `to show not only how ancient Chinese thought can help us understand translation more ecologically but how ecological approaches to the study of translation can help us understand ancient Chinese thought more clearly' (p. viii). Undoubtedly The Dao of Translation will engage not only linguists and translation scholars, but also those who do research on ancient Chinese philosophy. -- Yunsheng Wang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and Qin Huang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2016

This book is a genuine contribution to translation studies in an age of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism. ... it introduces insightful ideas from semiotics, ancient Chinese philosophy, neuroscience and psychology into translation studies. Robinson wishes 'to show not only how ancient Chinese thought can help us understand translation more ecologically but how ecological approaches to the study of translation can help us understand ancient Chinese thought more clearly' (p. viii). Undoubtedly The Dao of Translation will engage not only linguists and translation scholars, but also those who do research on ancient Chinese philosophy. -- Yunsheng Wang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and Qin Huang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2016

Author Information

Douglas Robinson is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. He has been a freelance translator of technical and literary texts from Finnish to English since 1975. He is also one of the world's leading translation scholars and the author of The Translator's Turn (John Hopkins University Press, 1991), Translation and Taboo (Illinois University Press, 1996), What Is Translation? (Kent State University Press, 1997), Translation and Empire (St. Jerome, 1997), Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to Nietzsche (St. Jerome, 1997), Who Translates? (SUNY Press, 2001), Translation and the Problem of Sway (John Benjamins, 2011) and Schleiermacher's Icoses (Zeta Books, 2013).

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