Where Theory and Practice Meet

Where Theory and Practice Meet is a collection of nineteen papers in translation studies. Unlike many similar books published in recent decades, which are mostly non-translation-oriented, veering to issues with little or no relevance to translation, this book focuses on the translator’s operation on languages, on theory formulation based on actual translation, on getting to grips with translation problems, and on explaining translation in language which can be understood by the general reader.

Perceptive and wide-ranging, the book covers language pairs that include Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Classical Greek, and discusses, among other things, translations of Dante’s La Divina Commedia; translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Goethe’s “Prometheus” as a case of untranslatability; the challenge of translating Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Primera Égloga” into Chinese; John Minford’s translation of martial arts fiction; and Lin Shu’s translation of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias.