Sociology has long sought to find out how acting in a situation and observing that situation may differ and nevertheless belong to a single kind of social operation. George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (1969) provides one way to conceive of such an operation. The present book is the first to make sociological use of his mathematical calculus of form, which has been extensively applied to cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, and mathematics. Spencer-Brown's theory states that any action or communication is always an operation that makes a distinction. Not only does this...

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 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.