Creative, Social and Transnational Perspectives on Translation

This series turns the spotlight on translation as an intrinsic and ubiquitous part of transnational social and cultural practices. The series is committed to bringing together two approaches to translation—the linguistic and the cultural—by commissioning books that examine how linguistic and cultural forms of translation inform each other. The recent move within translation studies towards studying languages and linguistic practices within wider social, cultural and political contexts is an important shift and can fruitfully inform wider cultural studies scholarship. This may range from large conceptual frameworks that define particular historical periods or societies to the minutiae that may have transformed the everyday.

This series counters the vision of translation as a static or instrumentalist activity that takes place only between languages or translators. Instead, it aims to place translation centre and front as the active, agentic and ineluctable integer in a mobile and malleable space of society. It recognises the site of translation as an exceptionally creative one that operates between any number of known and unknown quantities to make sense of the fast-transforming world around us, to understand the continuation of the past in our present and how historical moments inform the contemporary. These acts of interpretation, mediation and negotiation constantly take place across cultures through visual, vocal, aural, written, analogue and digital technologies.