This chapter examines what is considered a fact in individual communications processed by the Human Rights Committee (HRC), recognized as the UN’s most authoritative human rights monitoring body. Despite its significance, little is known about the HRC’s handling of individual complaints against states that have signed the optional protocol. Through the case studies of Sanila-Aikio v. Finland (2018) and Näkkäläjärvi et al. v. Finland (2018), which address the inclusion of new voters on the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, the chapter scrutinizes the Committee’s evidentiary practices. Notably, the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court added ninety-three persons to the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, while an unreferenced study suggested over half a million could be eligible. The Committee included this study without verifying its reliability. The chapter explores how evidence is translated and distanced from Committee members, questioning how material veracity is determined. It concludes by reflecting on how the HRC’s evidentiary regime shapes and supports certain narratives while marginalizing others.

The Introduction explains important concepts and what they mean in this book. It also outlines the project scope, which covers both written and spoken uses of machine translation to fulfil communication and information access purposes in one of the sectors selected for analysis. Following a brief historical account of how social conceptions of machine translation have changed, the Introduction addresses a recent shift in translation research towards multilingual communication practices that take place outside education settings or the language services industry. Given how fast language technologies are evolving, it will not take long for the tools and types of human–computer interaction that appear in the book to change quite significantly. The Introduction addresses implications of this dynamic landscape for this book specifically and for translation and multilingual communication research more broadly.

A brief afterword considers the imperial moment in which the volume was prepared for production alongside the volume’s collectively told story about empire and American letters—a story that also points to some of the most exciting new directions in literary studies more broadly.

This essay reflects on the challenges and intentions behind translating Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. He examines the delicate balance between fidelity to the original and fluency in English, striving to preserve Carpentier’s baroque style and powerful themes of colonialism, slavery and racism. The chapter delves into the cultural and historical layers of the novel, especially its foundation in lo real maravilloso – a Latin American lens where the marvelous and real coexist. Through personal insight, the author portrays translation as both an impossible and an essential act that revitalizes meaning for contemporary readers.

The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

Through a close analysis of the diction used by medieval translators of the biblical narrative in which Adam names the non-human animals, this introduction presents the book’s scope and argument. The first human seems to have had no difficulty giving the other animals their names, his success implicitly communicating his dominance as a rational, speaking creature; exegetes like Augustine pressed this point, citing the naming narrative as evidence for humanity’s status as the only rational animal. However, the medieval translators who rendered the naming scene in words of their own seemed notably less confident than Adam, their texts differing from one another in ways that suggest the discovery of uncertainty and confusion, rather than intuitive transparency, where speech and species intersect. The difficulty reflects fundamental features of the medieval lexicon employed to articulate the relationship between speech, reason, and species identity: Crucial terms such as animal and beste were ambiguous and inconsistent in meaning, leaving the precise place of the rational-discursive faculty in a state of suspense.

This chapter studies the history of translations of Alejo Carpentier’s novels into German. As Reisinger shows, novels by Carpentier were translated starting in the 1950s, but it took several translators and several changes of publishers to make Carpentier’s novels successful in German translation. In establishing Carpentier in the 1970s as one of the great Latin American writers, a crucial role was played by literary scout Michi Strausfeld and publishing house Suhrkamp. Relations between East and West Germany were relatively fluid, but Carpentier’s greatest success was in the West.

This chapter surveys how contemporary White nationalist publications use ancient evidence to promote pseudoscientific theories of race that justify violence and oppression. Such interpretations do not distort ancient sources; challenging them requires challenging the modern assumption of the biological and genetic reality of race. In fact, the ancient evidence that White nationalist intellectuals cite reveals the pervasiveness in antiquity of attitudes towards human difference that can productively be understood as racial even after the pseudoscientific assumptions these interpreters impose on that evidence have been rejected. Furthermore, they prompt us to recognise the persistence of pseudoscientific understandings of race in many popular translations of ancient works and standard reference lexica, understandings that remain unchallenged and even unrecognised as long as the relevance of the categories of race and racism to the study of antiquity is denied.

As a field, Classics relies heavily on translation. Many classicists believe that their translations are objective and neutral. However, translations, whether of ancient or modern texts, reflect the positionality of the translator. Therefore, translations cannot be neutral or objective. The translator must be transparent about their social location and positionality. If not, the epistemic injustice of colonialist, imperialistic discourse remains intact. Case studies drawn from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Pliny illustrate this.

Concerned with Emerson’s aging and the authorial integrity of his later works, critics traditionally discounted the compositions Emerson delivered or published after 1860. Important editorial scholarship, however, has opened new prospects for reconsidering the intellectual vitality of late Emerson, now accessible in The Later Lectures and in the publication of the final volumes of the Collected Works, including Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Building upon the critical reconsideration of Emerson’s considerable engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, this chapter identifies Emerson’s rhetoric as a significant concept in, and creative context for, the sometimes collaborative and often iterative “recomposition” of the later work. Three rhetorical figurations of Emerson’s late styles – metonymy, analogy, and translation – are traced across works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and the unfinished Natural History of Intellect.

This chapter examines how achievement books produced by Egyptian state institutions have narrated and re-narrated the 1952 revolution. These books were centrally published by the Information Department, a crucial yet seldom studied organ in the emerging Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, as well as public relations units across different ministries. After a brief institutional history of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as a whole, in which I demonstrate how ‘culture’ and ‘media’ were originally intertwined in administrative terms, I argue that the state’s achievements were narrated according to a changing conception of the revolution between 1954 and 1970. This rhetoric cemented a distinctive version of history among Egyptian bureaucrats, in which long lists of achievements came to articulate the bureaucratic corps’ contributions to the revolution. Moreover, it aimed to counter colonial propaganda via a systematic presentation of ‘the true Egypt’ in numerous European languages. In short, achievement books recorded, disseminated, and embodied the revolution’s accomplishments for a domestic and an international audience.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

This essay explores the significance of modern French writers, especially Flaubert, Maupassant, and Proust, for Bowen’s thinking and writing. It traces the influence of these figures on her short stories, essays, and novels. Across her career, she reviewed, translated, and cited these and other French authors. In Maupassant, she found a way of mapping the relation between short story and novel onto the division between poetry and prose. From Flaubert, she borrowed a close attention to pacing and rhythm, as well as an interest in the more indirect ways that history might intervene in the novel. Most obviously, perhaps, Proustian notions of memory inflected her own plots and narrative structures, as well as her prose style. Modern French fiction offered Bowen a series of models – and foils – for her own developing theories of character, style, and form. These intertextual resonances reveal how Bowen situated herself in a broader European tradition, rather than British, Irish, or English alone.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.