English-German Self-Translation of Academic Texts and its Relevance for Translation Theory and Practice

This book is a detailed study of the phenomenon of self-translation investigated by comparing self-translations of academic texts by, among others, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Arnheim, Klaus Mann and Stefan Heym, to student translations of the same texts. The detailed linguistic analysis of the differences between the self-translations and the student translations with regard to macrostructure, syntax and reference draws conclusions as to the specific translation stance taken by the bicultural self-translators. The findings of the corpus analysis are then related to models of the translation process, a new model is proposed and the usefulness of self-translation study for the teaching of translation is outlined.