Milton John, Bandia Paul. Agents of Translation

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009. — 337 p. — ISBN 978-90-272-9107-3 (Benjamins Translation Library - 81)Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests.
The articles describe Francisco Miranda, the “precursor” of Venezuelan independence, who promoted translations of works on the French Revolution and American independence; 19th century Brazilian translations of articles taken from the Révue Britannique about England; Ahmed Midhat, a late 19th century Turkish journalist who widely translated from Western languages; Henry Vizetelly , who (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce the works of Zola to a wider public in Victorian Britain; and Henry Bohn, who, also in Victorian Britain, (successfully) published a series of works from the classics, many of which were expurgated; Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose adaptation of a North American geography textbook in the Meiji period promoted the concept of the superiority of the Japanese over their Asian neighbours; Samuli Suomalainen and Juhani Konkka, whose translations helped establish Finnish as a literary language; Hasan Alî Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education, who set up the Turkish Translation Bureau in 1939; the Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work showed that the Ancient Egyptians had African rather than Indo-European roots; the Centro Cultural de Évora theatre group, which introduced Brecht and other contemporary drama into Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution; 20th century Argentine translators of poetry; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who have brought translation to the forefront of literary activity in Brazil; and, finally, translators of Bosnian poetry, many of whom work in exile.John Milton and Paul Bandia — Introduction: Agents of Translation and Translation Studies
Georges L. Bastin — Francisco de Miranda, intercultural forerunner
Maria Eulália Ramicelli — Translating cultural paradigms: The role of the Revue Britannique for the first Brazilian fiction writers
Akiko Uchiyama — Translation as representation: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s representation of the “Others”
Denise Merkle — Vizetelly & Company as (ex)change agent: Towards the modernization of the British publishing industry
Carol O’Sullivan — Translation within the margin: The “Libraries” of Henry Bohn
Cemal Demircioğlu — Translating Europe: The case of Ahmed Midhat as an Ottoman agent of translation
Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar — A cultural agent against the forces of culture: Hasan-Âli Yücel
Outi Paloposki — Limits of freedom: Agency, choice and constraints in the work of the translator
Paul Bandia — Cheikh Anta Diop: Translation at the service of history
Lisa Rose Bradford — The agency of the poets and the impact of their translations: Sur, Poesía Buenos Aires, and Diario de Poesía as aesthetic arenas for twentieth-century Argentine letters
Thelma Médici Nóbrega and John Milton — The role of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in bringing translation to the fore of literary activity in Brazil
Christine Zurbach — The theatre translator as a cultural agent: A case study
Francis R. Jones — Embassy networks: Translating post-war Bosnian poetry into English