ABSTRACT
As high schools and universities seek to globalise their curricula, not only has the teaching of texts in translation become an increasingly common practice, but so too has the teaching of texts from cultures with which the instructor may have little or no familiarity. Despite this fact, there continues to be strong resistance to granting translated texts a unique ontological status and to acknowledging their value as teachable moments; such resistance comes, on the one hand, from departments of foreign languages, which see translations as diverting student attention away from ‘original’ texts, and, on the other, from international publishing conglomerates, which suppress the notion that a translated text is different from the original and from other target language texts by promoting a regime of readability and domestication (see Lennon 2010). Within the play of these forces, the fact of translation tends to be either ignored or treated as a necessary evil, leaving students to surmise that these texts are somehow exact replicas of the original or hopelessly distorted copies. And while many instructors may feel compelled to address what David Damrosch refers to as “the problematics of translation”, the fact is there are until only recently few materials available to guide instructors on how to integrate such discussions into the curriculum. Indeed, in Damrosch’s 400-page Teaching World Literature (Damrosch 2009b), only one chapter in that volume offers any guidance on how to do so, and that chapter assumes a common second language among the students, which is rarely if ever the case in large survey courses on world literature.
