Media and Translation - by Dror Abend-David (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Over the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in publications on media and translation. In fact, there are those who believe that so much has been published in this field that any further publications are superfluous. But if one views media and translation as anything ranging from film and television drama to news-casting, commercials, video games, web-pages and electronic street signs, it would seem that research in media and translation has barely scratched the surface.
The research in this field is shared largely by scholars in communication and translation studies, often without knowledge of each other or access to their respective methods of scholarship. This collection will rectify this lack of communication by bringing such scholars together and creating a context for a theoretical discussion of the entire emerging field of Media and Translation, with a preference for theoretical work (rather than case studies) on translation and communications of various forms, and through various media.

Review Quotes

"Organized in seven parts including acknowledgments, preface, editor's note, author biographies, and index, the book is the brainchild of a course created five years ago by the editor himself at Tel Aviv University, touted for producing top-notch scholarship. At some point I would like to see reference librarians, language scholars, translators, and interpreters as well as literary critics organizing workshops on the topic of media and translation in the 21st century and dissecting this book's contents." --International Journal of Communication

"Indeed, the book is remarkably unique, at least within AVT scholarship, in celebrating [multidisciplinary] by combining experts, theoretical frameworks and methodologies from an impressively wide variety of academic fields ... Bringing together so many different aspects of the translation-media interface is a commendable achievement." --The Journal of Specialised Translation

"In the preface to this volume, Susan Bassnett explains that the essays in this collection exemplify a new trend of interdisciplinary research, which is the result of a changing, more globalised world, and she welcomes the diverse approach adopted in this volume. I agree. This is an essential contribution to Media Studies and Translation Studies, and it will surely attract a diverse audience, including academics and students alike." - Marian Flanagan, Aarhus University, Denmark, Linguistica Antverpiensia

"In addition to shedding new light on established forms of media translation, this volume presents research on more recent features of the multilingual media landscape, such as live subtitling with speech recognition, promotional trailers, and fan-generated spin-offs. With its broad cultural scope and its striking combination of aesthetic, linguistic, political, socio-economic and technological perspectives, the book takes the reader on an exciting intellectual adventure. Media and Translation should appeal to a broad readership in the Humanities and the Social Sciences generally, and to the Media Studies and Translation Studies communities in particular, convincingly demonstrating how much ground they share in today's intensely globalised, media-dominated and multilingual world." --Dirk Delabastita, Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory, University of Namur, Belgium, and Research Fellow, K.U. Leuven, Belgium

"In a babel of disciplinary voices, this book provides a thoughtful selection of essays that evidence the complexity of media translation and the wide variety of approaches it inspires. While there is a practical thread running through the whole book, the emphasis here is on understanding and theorizing, making it an essential contribution to translation studies." --Abé Markus Nornes, Department Chair of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor of Asian Cinema, University of Michigan, USA

About the Author

Dror Abend-David is a Lecturer at the department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. He is a scholar of Media and Translation, and the author of Scorned My Nation: A Comparison of Translations of The merchant of Venice into German, Hebrew and Yiddish (2003). He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from New York University (2001), and has published extensively on Translation in relation to Media, Literature, and Jewish Culture.