Book review. Translation Studies (Revised Edition.).London and New York: Routledge, 1991. xxii + 168 pp. ISBN 0-415-06528-3 £7.99
Table of contents
The new edition of this well-established introduction to Translation Studies, first published in 1980, includes a new preface and an extended bibliography containing new work in Translation Studies written in English from 1980 to 1990. The preface emphasises however how much work in the field has been undertaken in India, Chinese- and Arabic-speaking countries, Latin America and Africa. This shift away from a Eurocentric perspective has wider implications, and helps explain the growing status of Translation Studies as a discipline in its own right rather than as an adjunct to other disciplines. Professor Bassnett indicates two ways in which this has come about, both of which are rather understated. One is the relationship between Translation Studies and post-colonial discourse (p. xiv), which is but one in a series of problems in post-modernist criticism regarding the formation and reception of texts, and the other is the reversal of the relation between Translation Studies and Comparative Literature where the latter, in her view, is to be seen as a subcategory of the former, contrary to the traditional perspective, in which Translation Studies was seen as a branch of Comparative Literature (p. 36, n. 1). The implications of this reversal are not examined here but should be given further consideration in Professor Bassnett's forthcoming book on Comparative Literature.
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