Publications

Publication details [#52813]

Hawkins, Spencer. 2023. German Philosophy in English Translation: postwar translation history and the making of the contemporary Anglophone humanities (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies). London: Routledge. 184 pp.
Publication type
Monograph
Publication language
English
Source language
Target language
Main ISBN
9781032391373

Abstract

German philosophy’s reputation for profundity is often understood to lie in German’s polysemous vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult to translate even into its close relative, English. Hawkins shows the merit in a strategy of “differential translation,” which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term in English for consistent translation. The book explores how debates around this strategy have polarized both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes. Well-known translators and commissioners such as Beaufret, Phillips, and Stambaugh come out boldly in favor, and others such as Laplanche and Pinkard polemically against it. Drawing on Blumenberg’s work on metaphor, this book questions prevalent norms around the translation of terminology that obscure the metaphoric dimension of German philosophical vocabulary.
Source : Based on publisher information

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