Everything is a Translation

The topic of this keenly researched research monograph is the allusive and interdisciplinary nature of literary translation. Dr. Martin's work concentrates on the fields of rhetoric and new media studies. That is, these fields are sites that help develop the theories and methodology presented, but are also sites that benefit from the study of literary translation.

Concerning rhetoric, this book explores how literary translation can take language users inside words and texts, for the translator has to constantly consider language and textual ecologies when translating. As a caveat, this work also examines how rhetoric can inform the literary translator’s practices.

Concerning online new media, this work argues that literary translation, in forcing the translator-reader to look in-between words, texts, and languages, can be applied to the study of remediation—how online new media and online new media works are never old or new, the same or different, but are remediations and thus translations themselves.

A special contribution of this research brings the theories and practices of literary translation to the forefront of interdisciplinary studies and pedagogies. Inspired by Andrea Lunsford and John L. Ruszkiewicz’s watershed textbook, Everything is an Argument (1998), in which the authors argue that language is a mode of argument and that argumentation permeates language and communication, Martin argues that translation underpins and models our everyday acts of communication, from uses (and theories) of online new media, to pedagogy.

While other works explore literary translation across disciplines, there is not yet a work that treats translation as a model and practice of interpretation . . . as heuretics and hermeneutics (i.e. a heuristic model), thus bringing to the forefront its interdisciplinary underpinnings. Furthermore, this work is the first to propose translation as a heuristic model for understanding new media.