Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Fiction, by Denise Kripper
This book offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended.
The volume looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent Latin American novels and short stories in Spanish to shed light on the complex dynamics and conditions under which translators perform their task. Kripper unpacks how the study of these works reveals translation not as an activity with communication as its end goal but rather as a mediating and mediated process shaped by the unique manipulations and motivations of translators and the historical and cultural contexts in which they work. In exploring the fictional representations of translators, the book also outlines pedagogical approaches and offers discussion questions for the implementation of translators’ narratives in translation, language, and literature courses.
Narratives of Mistranslation will be of interest to scholars and educators in translation studies, especially those working in literary translation and translation pedagogy, Latin American literature, world literature, and Latin American studies.
Listen to an interview about the book for the New Books Network Podcast
Read an interview about the book in the Reading in Translation Blog
The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation, edited by Delfina Cabrera & Denise Kripper
The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation offers an understanding of translation in Latin America both at a regional and transnational scale. Broad in scope, it is devoted primarily to thinking comprehensively and systematically about the intersection of literary translation and Latin American literature, with a curated selection of original essays that critically engage with translation theories and practices outside of hegemonic Anglo centers.
In this introductory volume, through survey and case-study chapters, contributing authors cover literary and cultural translation in the region historically, geographically, and linguistically. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters focus on issues ranging from the role of translation in the construction of national identities to the challenges of translation in the current digital age. Areas of interest expand from the United States to the Southern Cone, including the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as the impact of Latin American literature internationally, and paying attention to translation from and to indigenous languages, Portuguese, English, French, German, Chinese, Spanglish, and more.
The first of its kind in English, this Handbook will shed light on different translation approaches and invite a rethinking of intercultural and interlingual exchanges from Latin American viewpoints. This is key reading for all scholars, researchers and students of literary translation studies, Latin American literature, and comparative literature.
Read a review in the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) journal
Watch the launch of the handbook at the Universidade de São Paulo
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