A World Atlas of Translation

What do people think of translation in the different historical, cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside, both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not.
But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact, the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports, the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously, the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect, the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.

Marc Pomerleau, Université Téluq, in Hermeneus Vol. 22 (2020).:
Se trata de una obra muy rica en su contenido. Obviamente, no todo el contenido es nuevo para los especialistas de la traducción, pero resulta evidente que no se podían dejar de lado las tradiciones más conocidas como las europeas y norteamericanas, así como las de ciertos países latinoamericanos como México y Brasil, y de algunos países asiáticos como Japón, China o India. Se nos hizo muy refrescante leer sobre traducción en regiones como el Pacífico Sur, Centroamérica y África en general, y sobre países como Angola, Australia, Belice o Tailandia, en particular.