Book review “Meine Sprache grenzt mich ab…” Transkulturalität und kulturelle Übersetzung im Kontext von Migration Wien/Berlin: LIT, 2008. 307 pp. ISBN 978-3-7000-0829-3 (Repräsentation—Transformation: Translating across Cultures and Societies, 3).
Table of contents
It is sometimes deplored at translation studies conferences that the discipline is not really flourishing institutionally in the most important and largest country of the European Union, Germany. Institutional embedding in a country’s educational structures generally leads to an important increase in research production too, as for instance the situation in the UK and Spain has shown. Since the number of German native speakers is by far the highest in the EU (depending on the source approx. 90 million, compared to 58 million for English or 55 million for French), translation studies in Europe has to cope with a serious and objective quantitative disadvantage. On several occasions, Mary Snell-Hornby (for instance 2006) has called for attention to the extremely rich German tradition of Translation Studies that has not received the attention it deserves in modern (and English-language dominated) translation studies. But despite the institutional situation of translation studies in Germany after the heyday of functional approaches, the Germanlanguage tradition certainly continues to exist in Austria. One concrete example is the relatively new series “Repräsentation—Transformation: Translating across Cultures and Societies” published by LIT Verlag in Vienna and Berlin. With a series editor like Michaela Wolf, it is probably no coincidence that the first volumes concentrated on social aspects and implications of translation and translating: the first volume focused on T&I as a social practice and on the “social turn”, the second one on the Austrian translation market. Whereas the first book in the series was trilingual (with contributions in German, English and French), the third volume of the series that is being reviewed here is monolingually German and concentrates on transculturality, cultural translation and migration.
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