Translation: A Translation Studies Journal [eScholarship]

Translation: A Translation Studies Journal, or TSJ for short, is a digital, peer-reviewed scholarly journal committed to publishing original, innovative, and potentially influential scholarly work on any aspect of literary translation. TSJ is also the venue for the publication of literary translations, from and into English - other source-target languages will be considered as long as a scholarly discussion of problems and translation methodology forms an integral part of the submission.

TSJ was born out of the Translation Studies Research Focus Group at the University of California Santa Barbara, and was conceived of originally as a graduate student-run journal. As such we produced the first two volumes of the journal, as paper issues that we soon hope to make accessible online. The UCSB Translation Studies Research Focus Group has meanwhile turned into a fully-fledged Ph.D. Emphasis in Translation Studies, with the cross-disciplinary collaboration of many UCSB Departments, and a biannual conference dedicated to literary translation.

While graduate student collaboration is still an important part of the journal, TSJ is now run by UCSB faculty and affiliated scholars in the field of literary translation. Its volumes are typically devoted to specific themes, and each issue is run by a committee of issue editors selected by the executive committee.

Current Issue, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011

The Necessary Foreign: Translating Dialects

Issue Editors: Philip Balma, Stefano Boselli, Viola Miglio

Managing Editor: Viola Miglio

Volume 3 is the first issue of the journal after its migration to the eScholarship platform, and it is devoted to the thorny problems of translating from and into dialects, which present a further level of complexity given that the choice of their use in literature is always a precise and conscious one by the author, hence it represents a ‘necessary foreign’ element in the original texts. The papers published here all address various aspects of rendering this ‘necessary foreign’ in translation. Most of them involve issues of dialect translation into/from Italian dialects. The special issue editors felt not only that the problems of translating dialects are a neglected facet of translation studies, but also that the extremely rich dialectal diversity of the Italian linguistic situation provided an excellent testing ground to highlight these issues. Volume 3 provides the Translation Studies community with an organic contribution addressing an important aspect of the discipline.