The scientific method known as empiricism has been attacked in two influential books in Translation Studies. Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict sees all knowledge as being produced through narrative, thereby excluding the processes of repeated testing and dialogue that can be associated with an empirical approach. Further, Baker’s failure to attend to textual linearity, voice, and narrator position lends her project an ideological essentialism that actively shuns such empirical testing. Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Changes Everything, on the other hand, escapes essentialism by insisting on the active interpretation of all data. However, Venuti thereby falsely opposes hermeneutics to empirical method, in a way that willfully ignores the key twentieth-century epistemologies of science. The resulting anti-empiricism leads him to some very questionable psychoanalytical conclusions and an excessive reliance on the authorities of dictionaries and distanced theorists. Neither Baker nor Venuti can say, as must any empiricist, ‘I don’t know.’
1965/1971Lire Le Capital (Translated by Ben Brewster as Reading Capital.) New York: Pantheon Books.
Baker, Mona
2006Translation and Conflict. A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona, and Andrew Chesterman
2008 “Ethics of Renarration.” Cultus 1 (1): 10–33. Accessed January 2015. [URL].
Balling, Laura W
2008 “A Brief Introduction to Regression Designs and Mixed-effects Modelling by a Recent Convert.” In Looking at Eyes: Eye-tracking Studies of Reading and Translation Processing, edited by Susanne Göpferich, Arnt L. Jakobsen, and Inger M. Mees, 175–192. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.
Buzelin, Hélène
2005 “Unexpected Allies: How Latour’s Network Theory Could Complement Bourdieusian Analyses in Translation Studies.” The Translator 11 (2): 193–218.
Fisher, Walter R
1987Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Gadamer, Hans Georg
1990/1993 “Die Vielfalt der Sprachen und das Verstehen der Welt” (originally published in 1990). In Kunst als Aussage (Gesammelte Werke, Band 81), edited by Hans Georg Gadamer, 339–349. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Ginsburgh, Victor, and Shlomo Weber
2011How Many Languages do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Goffman, Erving
1981Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1988/2000 “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 172–185. London and New York: Routledge.
Law, John
1997 “Traduction/Trahison: Notes on ANT.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Accessed April 2015. [URL].
Popper, Karl
1959/2002The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London and New York: Routledge.
Pym, Anthony
1999 “Scandalous Statistics? A Note on the Percentages of Translations into English.” Source. The Newsletter of the Literary Division of the American Translators Association 291: 7–19.
2024.
Semiosic Translation: a Bayesian-heuristic theory of translation and translating. Language and Semiotic Studies 0:0
Wang, Feng, Keqiang Liu & Philippe Humblé
2023. Reframing the narrative of magic wind in Arthur Waley’s translation of Journey to the West: another look at the abridged translation. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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