Introduction

Abstract

Everyone has a theory of translation — from the reader of the Penguin Classics translation of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (2009), who admires Fallada’s style, to the foreign diplomat who, when summoned to the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in 2007 and reprimanded for expressing a less than positive view of Ireland, blamed his translator. In the first case, the reader assumes that she is reading Fallada’s words and therefore believes a translation to be identical to its source text (ST). In the second, the diplomat knows that it is acceptable to blame the translator in a society that views translation as invariably inadequate and considers translators to be not real professionals.