Jeroen Vandaele

In the age of big data, evidence keeps suggesting that small, elusive and infrequent details make all the difference in our appreciation of humanistic texts—film, fiction, and philosophy. This book argues, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, that expertise in humanistic translation is precisely the capacity to capture those details that are bigger than they seem. In humanistic translation, the expert handling of big details usually serves audiences and the original, but mala fide translation also works the details for subtle manipulation and audience deception. A focus on textual detail is therefore characteristic of humanistic translators but also compatible with central claims of the cultural turn in translation studies. This book, written by a scholar and teacher of literary, essayistic, and audiovisual translation, endeavors to articulate a seemingly dual interest—on textual detail and cultural analysis—as a single one. It theorizes connections between micro and macro analysis, between translation as detail and translation as culture, thus hoping to build bridges between humanistic translators and translation scholars. It acknowledges tensions between practice and theory and proposes a way forward: practitioners and scholars share ways of thinking—varieties of "part-whole thinking"—that machines can never acquire.

Part-Whole Thinking as Practice and Theory

Translation and Big Details

It is all too often assumed that humour is the very effect of a text. But humour is not a perlocutionary effect in its own right, nor is laughter. The humour of a text may be as general a characteristic as a serious text's seriousness. Like serious texts, humorous texts have many different purposes and effects. They can be subdivided into specific subgenres, with their own perlocutionary effects, their own types of laughter (or even other reactions). Translation scholars need to be able to distinguish between various kinds of humour (or humorous effect) when comparing source and target texts, especially since the notion of "effect" pops up so frequently in the evaluation of humorous texts and their translations. In this special issue of The Translator, an attempt is made to delineate types of humorous effect, through careful linguistic and cultural analyses of specific examples and/or the introduction of new analytical tools. For a translator, who is both a receiver of the source text and sender of the target text, such analyses and tools may prove useful in grasping and pinning down the perlocutionary effect of a source text and devising strategies for producing comparable effects in the target text. For a translation scholar, who is a receiver of both source and target texts, the contributions in this issue will hopefully provide an analytical framework for the comparison of source and target perlocutionary effects.

Translating Humour

Geert Brône

This volume offers a state-of-the-art collection of studies in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of cognitive poetics. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts. By bringing together key players and critics in a setting of interdisciplinary dialogue, this volume captures the goals, gains and gaps of this emerging field.

Jeroen Vandaele

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