1st Edition
The Pushing-Hands of Translation and its Theory In memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953-2013
This book presents an East-West dialogue of leading translation scholars responding to and developing Martha Cheung’s "pushing-hands" method of translation studies. Pushing-hands was an idea Martha began exploring in the last four years of her life, and only had time to publish at article length in 2012. The concept of pushing-hands suggests a promising line of inquiry into the problem of conflict in translation. Pushing-hands opens a new vista for translation scholars to understand and explain how to develop an awareness of non-confrontational, alternative ways to handle translation problems or problems related to translation activities that are likely to give rise to tension and conflict. The book is a timely contribution to celebrate Martha's work and also to move the conversation forward. Despite being somewhat tentative and experimental, it probes into how to enable and develop dynamic interaction between and reciprocal determinism of different hands involved in the process of translation.
1. Introduction, Douglas Robinson Part 1: Backgrounds and Definitions 2. "Pushing Hands with Martha Cheung: The Genealogy of a Translation Metaphor", Sean Golden 3. "‘Pushing Hands’: Getting Translation Down to a Fine (Martial) Art", Zhu Chunshen 4. "Listening to Pushing-Hands: With Reference to the Translation and Transmission of Chinese Arts", Jiang Chengzhi Part 2: Practical Applications 5. "Pushing Hands and the Invisible Hand: Investigating the Chinese Translations of The Wealth of Nations from a New Perspective", Chan Lung Jan, Andy 6. "From Pushing Hands to Kneading Hands – Translational Perspectives on the Culinary Arts", Michael Cronin 7. "Tui Shou: A Theoretical Framework for (Re)translation History?", Marie-France Guénette 8. "Pushing Paper, Pushing Hands, Pushing the Envelope: Three Eleanors (Arts as Historiography) as Theatrical Translation Across Media", Dorothy Chansky 9. "The Pushing-hands Approach to Translation Practice - A Case Study of Team Translation of A Full Load of Moonlight by Mary M.Y. Fung and David Lunde", Lee Kwok Kan, Gloria 10. "Translation Paratexts and the Pushing-Hands Approach to Translation History", Kathryn Batchelor Part 3: Theoretical Applications 11. "Applying the ‘Pushing-Hands Approach’ to a Dialogue among Histoire Croisée, Microhistory and Macrohistory", Judy Wakabayashi 12. "Engaging a Pushing-Hands Approach to [Research on] Translation Histories", Lauren Pfister 13. "Pushing-Hands and Periperformativity", Douglas Robinson
Biography
Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. A scholar of language, literature, translation, and rhetoric and a translator from Finnish to English since 1975, he is author most recently of Schleiermacher’s Icoses (Zeta Books, 2013), The Dao of Translation (Routledge, 2015), The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle (SUNY Press, 2015), and Semiotranslating Peirce (Tartu Semiotics Library, 2015). His current project is an English translation of Finland’s greatest novel, Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers (1870).
"As a balancing and rebalancing of different forces involved in translation to avoid or reduce confrontation, this book of collected essays opens up an exciting way of thinking about how the "pushing-hands" approach can be further explored and extended and developed by uncovering the mediating translator’s dialogic engagement and providing a model for working across temporal and cultural differences in producing carefully balanced translations." – Sun Yi-feng, Professor, Lingnan University
