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Translating Canada
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Canadian federal governments offered varying degrees of support for literary and other artistic endeavour. A corollary of this patronage of culture at home was an effort to make the resulting works available for audiences elsewhere in the world. Current developments in the study of translation and its influence as cultural transfer have made possible new assessments of such efforts to project a national image abroad.
Translating Canada examines cultural materials exported by Canada in addition to those selected for acquisition by German publishers, theatres, and other culture brokers. It also considers the motivations of particular translators and the reception by German reviewers of works by a wide variety of Canadian writers — novelists and poets, playwrights and children’s authors, literary and social critics. Above all, the book maps for its readers a number of significant, though frequently unsuspected, roles that translation assumes in the intercultural negotiation of national images and values. The chapters in this collection will be of value to students, teachers, and scholars in a number of fields. Informed lay readers, too, will appreciate the authors’ insights into the different ways in which translation has contributed to German reception of Canadian books and culture.
Contributors
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.
