The essays of this volume reflect the tremendous semantic extension the term 'translation' has experienced in the recent debates, which have transformed it into a key term in current issues about language, literature and culture. In the wake of the culture concepts of the 1980s, translation has emerged as the central analytical term for the contact of cultures, while the poststructuralist idea of the infinite chain of the signification process has helped to establish it as a dynamic model. In the course of recent research developments, the issues discussed in an ever-widening field of translation studies began to interconnect with issues discussed in equally topical and newly-established research areas of postcolonial studies and questions of 'World Englishes' and their lively cultural and literary exchanges. The essays of this volume take up and develop this general premise of a close interrelationship in processes of translation between language and culture, and the resulting linkage in the study of these processes between research in language and translation studies, on the one hand, and cultural and literary studies, on the other. The thematic scope stretches across the entire spectrum from issues in translations from one language and culture to another, through problems of and new avenues for cultural interchange as presented in works of art, to questions of translation theory and intercultural exchange on the most general level.
About the Author: KLAUS STIERSTORFER is Professor of English at the University of Munster, Germany. He studied at the Universities of Regensburg and Oxford, received his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, trained as a secondary school teacher and became associate professor at the University of Wurzburg, from where he moved on to take up his professorships at Dusseldorf and, since 2004, at Munster. His publications include John Oxenford (1812-1877) as Farceur and Critic of Comedy (1996); (ed., introd., annot.), London Assurance and Other Victorian Comedies. Oxford World's Classics (2001); Konstruktion literarischer Vergangenheit (2001, forthcoming in English translation, vol. 1, 2006), and (series editor) Women Writing Home, 6 vols. (2006). MONIKA GOMILLE is Professor of English and director of the MA Studies Programme on Literary Translation at the University of Dusseldorf. She is the editor of the German translations of poems in Louise Ho/Klaus Stierstorfer (Eds.), Hongkong. Poems/Gedichte. Englisch-Deutsch. Tubingen: Stauffenberg, 2006.