The rapid, recent, and international growth of interest in problems of translation has scarcely registered in literature departments in the United States. Here translation is still largely seen as a didactic exercise, and translation studies is regarded as groping toward rules about how to carry an utterance from one language into another. In Europe and Israel, however, university centers have been established to further the "science of translation" and the training of professional translators, resulting in an outpouring of practical and theoretical literature on the domain of translation....

This volume attempts for the first time a comprehensive view of the momentous process of German-American cultural transfer during the 18th and 19th centuries, which played an important part in the formation of an American national and cultural identity, a process to which the New England Transcendentalists contributed some of the decisive ingredients, but which has largely escaped the attention of German and American scholarship. In each chapter a specific problem is treated systematically from a clearly defined perspective, deficiencies of existing translation theories are exposed, so that...

This volume has a dual purpose: to acquaint American readers and academic communities with some of the most important trends in European and Israeli translation studies, and to bring together this work with that of American scholars who have begun to participate in this field.