The Relations Between Translation and Material Text Transfer

Anthony Pym
c/o SFB 309, Göttingen

The notion of text transfer, understood as the material moving of texts across space-time, makes it possible to see the relationships between transfer and translation as not only causal (texts are translated because they are transferred), but also economic (translation is one of several options for the distribution of textual resources), semiotic (translations represent acts of transfer), and epistemological (attention to transfer affects the way translations are perceived). Awareness of these relationships should open up new possibilities for strongly interdisciplinary research into the nature and history of translation.

Table of contents

Itamar Even-Zohar (1990) has proposed that translation be studied within the wider frame offered by a general theory of transfer. Rather than exclude all the non-translational results of transfer, he suggests we should consider them of extreme pertinence to the very definition of our field and procedures:

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