Friday 1 November 2013

Translationstudiesforfree part 4: Repositories of researchers' publications




This is the next instalment in the translationstudiesforfree series, which tries to highlight good open access resources for translation researchers.

I mentioned in a previous post that some translation scholars have their own websites where selections of their work can be downloaded. Theo Hermans was the scholar in question, but of course there are many others. Anthony Pym's website has a huge quantity of resources. Many of Andrew Chesterman's publications can be found on the open web. His homepage has a number of links. His short article from 1996: 'Psst! Theory can be useful!' cheers me up with its practical good sense. He offers a useful overview of Skopos theory here. On conference interpreting, see the rich resources gathered by Daniel Gile. On public service interpreting, see Holly Mikkelson's page.

Several scholars have extensive publications lists on academia.edu, including Mona Baker (lots of her work here on translation and narration). Another senior scholar represented is Douglas Robinson, who has several articles on the site including his '22 theses about translation' which remain as rich as ever.

In fact, academia.edu has unending riches for translation scholars, from Catherine Baker on military interpreting in the Balkans to Chris Rundle on translation and censorship in Fascist Italy; from Rachele Antonini on child language brokering to Federico Zanettin on comics translation; from Chris Larkosh on sexualities and translation in Latin America to Kyle Conway on news translation.

Of course this is a tiny and reductive selection of topics; there's much more to be found with a bit of patient rummaging. Note that on academia.edu it would be usual to find preprint versions of articles, but one may also find extended or alternate versions of work (e.g. Nicholas Watson's 'Director's Cut' of his entry on theories of translation in the medieval volume of the Oxford History of Literary Translation into English - nice!) It's also a place where people upload drafts of conference papers. So in textual terms, one needs, in the words of Alastor Moody, 'constant vigilance!'

PhD theses can increasingly be found on the open web, either on their authors' webpages, in institutional repositories or via services such as the British Library's Ethos in the UK (try looking up 'subtitling' or 'literary translation' to see the range of theses available). Abstracts of PhD theses are published regularly in New Voices in Translation Studies.

More suggestions for academics' pages with good resources are welcome in the comments.

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