What Is Translation Studies?
“When we speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows.”
Octavio Paz
Being a student or scholar of translation offers many different experiences: translation workshops present a collaborative environment and an atmosphere of cooperation and exchange that benefits both participants and facilitators. Students not only acquire the skills of a translator but also learn how reading and interpreting a translation differs from engaging with a text in its original language. The study of translation theory equips students with the conceptual tools to understand challenges faced by translators, and to analyze and write about translations meaningfully.
George Steiner famously wrote that “all acts of communication are acts of translation.” If we accept Steiner’s assertion, or even seek to expand upon it, it soon becomes apparent just how much the study of translation can help us deepen our understanding of the world:
Translation facilitates intercultural communication.
Through translation, we are able to enter into a dialogue with people who speak languages other than our own. Translation opens the door to the many literatures of the world, to understanding other cultures and countries, and enables these interactions to take on a complexity that would otherwise be limited to those within the same language area.
Translation offers a new perspective on reading and interpretation.
All interpretation—meaning the way we enter into and engage with a text—is translation. Interpretation allows us to recreate a text with meaning, to translate the way the original author understands and represents the world into our own understanding of it. This extends far beyond the written word: when we listen to a pianist play a piece of music, we are not simply hearing the piece as it was written by the composer but how it is interpreted through the experience and perspective of the pianist; the same applies to a painting or a photograph or a piece of digital artwork. By studying interpretation, we understand that by necessity our enjoyment of any art form requires a translation process of some sort, from the experience of the artist into our own.
Translation fosters interdisciplinary thinking.
By its very nature, the study of translation is interdisciplinary. Being a translation scholar means being comfortable moving between disciplines, such as comparative literature, linguistics, cultural studies, art, history, and many others. The field of translation studies is constantly engaged in creating bridges between the humanities, the arts, technology, and the sciences.
By necessity, studying translation also requires a perpetual orientation toward the future. Emerging technologies and methods of creating and manipulating digital media have opened up boundless new possibilities for the field. These advancements have provided translators and translation scholars with a set of digital tools that enable forms of interpretation, reconstruction and representing texts and other artworks that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. This development has made the study of translation significantly more accessible to a wider audience, has improved collaboration and communication between scholars globally, and has enabled us to teach translation and present academic works in new and innovative ways. Online platforms such as Three Percent, InTranslation, and Words Without Borders bring together translators and scholars, or those who are both, as is often the case.
The Center for Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas promotes translation as a key element of any well-rounded humanities education. As an academic discipline, the field of translation studies is uniquely situated at the intersection between scholarship and practice—the interdisciplinarity that is inherent to studying this subject prevents the insularity that plagues many other fields and has always led to a lively cross-pollination between academics and praxis. Studying translation can benefit students from many fields, whether they wish to specialize in it or simply to learn a new way of engaging with literature of other cultures.
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