Introduction

Luise von Flotow

Luise von Flotow is a professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. She has taught at the Universities of Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Vienna and as a visiting professor in Chile, Turkey, Iran, and Ecuador. Her research is focused on cultural and political differences between cultures and eras and their expression in translation; she has published extensively in this area: Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism (1997), also available in Chinese and Czech translation; The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (coedited with Daniel Russell and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 2001); How Simone de Beauvoir Talks Sex in English(2002), Julia Evelina Smith, Traductrice de la Bible: Doing More Than Any Man Has Ever Done (2002); Sacrificing Sense to Sound:Mimetic Translation and Feminist Writing (2004); Self-Translation and Exile: Nancy Huston, ‘Passing’ in Paris (2006); La traducción a principios del siglo XXI: El fin equivalencia (2006); Frenching the Feature Film Twice(2006). She is also a translator of literary texts from German and French and is currently translating a selection of texts by Ulrike Meinhof as well as La langue et le nombril(1998), a history of Quebec’s obsession with language. The Third Shore, an anthology of East-Central European women writers (post-1989), which she coedited and translated with Agata Schwartz, has come out with Northwestern University Press (2006).

Reingard M. Nischik

Reingard M. Nischik is a professor of American literature at the University of Constance, Germany. She belongs among the pioneers of Canadian literature studies in Germany and Europe at large, with her first article on CanLit published in 1981. Since then, among her numerous publications, there have been more that thirty articles and fifteen books exclusively or partly devoted to Canadian literature. To these publications belongs the trailblazing volume that she co-edited with Robert Kroetsch, Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature (1985). More recent books that she has edited and co-authored include The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), with contributors deriving mainly from Germany, and Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, with international contributors (Rochester, NY: Camden House; Toronto: Anansi, 2000/2002), for which she received the Best Book Award of the Margaret Atwood Society. Nischik has for decades contributed to cultural transfer between Canada and Germany in many different ways, including her managing editorship of the German interdisciplinary journal Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, which she co-edited from 1992 to 2005. Central interests of her research are Canadian fiction and Margaret Atwood's oeuvre and the interstices between literature and the American and Canadian literature and the interstices between literature and the visual media. She is currently co-authoring and editing History of Canadian Literature: English-Canadian and French-Canadian the first history of Canadian literature prepared for an American publisher (2008–09), with mainly Canadian and German contributors.