What is it about?
This is not only a reflection on the reception of The Translator's Turn but a self-reflection on problems of tone in my work that may lead readers to misunderstand it.
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Why is it important?
It is useful for authors not only to reflect back on why they wrote what they wrote but why it was received the way it was received, because it is all too common for readers to think of publications as the truth--rather than as a collection of opinions and orientations organized argumentatively.
Perspectives
The Translator's Turn was a pretty big book. It not only put me on the map in Translation Studies, leading to many invitations to give guest lectures and workshops around the world; it also got me excited about the field, and turned my attention increasingly to TS, so that I ended up publishing a total of 7 books on translation in the nineties. But it was also a pretty strongly misunderstood book: many people have come up to me at conferences and said "Oh, you're the guy who says translators don't need to think." Is that partly why people got excited about the book--that they thought I was excusing them from critical thinking?
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
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This page is a summary of: The somatics of tone and the tone of somatics, Translation and Interpreting Studies, December 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tis.10.2.09rob.
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