Discussion
Translation and the "Meme"

Hans J. Vermeer
Heidelberg, Germany

Table of contents

The following remarks may perhaps provide some new points of view for the translator's work as well as the relationship between target and source texts. I am offering some ideas about ideas (memes about memes) as put forward by various authors in the last decade or so. A few of their possible implications for Translation Studies will be taken up in another article (Vermeer forthcoming). A suitable basis for the following considerations seems to have been supplied by recent work on evolutionary biology and philosophy (cf. Riedl and Delpos 1996) and brain physiology and psychology (cf., e.g., Damasio 1994; Calvin and Ojemann 1995; Crick 1994).

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