55 Books Like Descriptive Translation Studies - and beyond

If I had to name one book that is almost the exact opposite of Toury’s, it is this one. Venuti’s book is the rare kind of scholarly book one reads over one or two sittings. It is angry, provocative, polemical, and just pure fun.

For Venuti, there is no separating fact from value, and whether it plans to or not, translation (and scholarship on translation) affects change in both text and world—often for the worst. If Toury’s book emulated scientific discourse, Venuti’s reads like a crossover between a political manifesto and a crime novel. Translation is a violent business, shrouded in suspicion and hidden agendas, that need to be exposed through symptomatic readings and critical analyses.

The book ends with a passionate call to action enlisting translators—despite the risks entailed therein—to develop new methodologies that will, as Venuti writes: “make a difference, not only at home [. . .] but… show more.

In 1893 the eminent scholar of Jewish studies, Moritz Steinschneider, astutely identified Jews as “Dolmetscher”— mediators between East and West, Christianity and Islam, ancient and modern languages. While early academic interest in Jewish translation primarily focused on the Middle Ages, the past two decades have seen a burgeoning fascination with translation across other periods (and spaces) of Jewish history.

Several outstanding books have emerged by literary historians such as Abigail Gillman, Aya Elyada, Tessa Rajak, and Omri Asscher, making it challenging to single out just one recommendation. But Naomi Seidman’s book had me hooked from page 1, where Seidman recounts the story of her father’s strategic mistranslation between Yiddish and French in Post-War Paris. For Seidman, whose brilliant analysis of this translation narrative offers one of the best introductions to an academic book I’ve read, such strategic mistranslations are emblematic of the complexities of Jewish-Christian dialogue and of the Jewish… show more.

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I… show more.

I stumbled upon Ronit Ricci’s captivating book while finalizing my own research on early modern Jewish translation in Europe. The experience of reading this book was a little like (what I can only imagine) discovering an unknown relative on 23andme must feel like.

Ricci explores the literary networks that developed during the spread of Islam through early modern South and Southeast Asia. She shows how translators from Arabic into Javanese, Malay, and Tamil developed a remarkably creative approach to translation and how they domesticated (“localized” is her preferred term) their sources, reshaping unfamiliar concepts to resonate with their target readers.

Engaging with Ricci’s book was an uncanny experience; here, in a distant translator culture, I found fascinating parallels to the issues and concerns I encountered in my own research, often approached in surprisingly similar ways. Who would have thought that Old Yiddish and Old Javanese shared such common ground?

I was still seeking examples of creative, fun writing in archaeology that captured some of the heart and joy of archaeological fieldwork when I encountered this humorous murder mystery-cum-archaeological methods textbook.

Reading it, I learned a lot about research design, different decisions archaeologists make while working, and various social and financial pressures that might impact the pace and approach of a project. But it’s also packed with silliness and dad jokes.

I still text inside jokes with people I excavated with more than a decade ago; this book captures both the complexities of doing archaeology as well as the inevitable goofiness that arises out of living, digging, and sweating with a group of people for weeks or months.

A classical book on anarchy within science. I find the proposed pluralist approach as the right way to avoid the monopolies of truth in present-day science. Feyerabend identified science as an ideology, which I might have found exaggerated and difficult to understand when I started to study science, but I understand it much better now, after 30 years of working as a researcher.

Forgetting about the relativism implicit in his proposal, focusing on the sociological aspect, I think there are many good and brave observations there that can enlighten us.

The proverbial scientist at work conjures the image of a solitary investigator bent over a workbench cluttered with arcane instruments nestled among reams of scribbled notes just waiting to be transformed into creative answers to pressing questions about the natural world. The image's simplicity belies the complexity of the process it purports to represent. Adding descriptions of the what, how, and why of scientific inquiry, observation, and analysis still misses a crucial element that makes the improvement, dissemination, and acceptance of new knowledge possible, namely the active behind-the-scenes collaboration between scientists and the illustrators, photographers, printers, and other artisans who use visual representation to shape and successfully communicate that knowledge. 

Mapping the Spectrum is not just an exhaustive and illuminating history of spectrum analysis.  In it, author Klaus Hentschel brilliantly exposes the essential role of visual culture in bringing this all-important tool of modern science to useful life.  He has… show more.

Less about biology specifically and more about the general value of the scientific method and rationalism; I think that this book should be read by everyone. Never smug or condescending, Sagan and Druyan show how easily one can be misled by mystical thinking and illustrate the many dangers of credulity.

From cargo cults to baloney detectors, this book is a primer for life in the modern world and how to recognize and protect against disinformation and one’s own biases. I have more than once bought copies of this book for people who are overly enthused about crystals.

As with any other academic discipline, philosophy has its own language. This is not jargon (or it shouldn’t be!). It is a technical terminology. To look at something very closely, as any academic discipline does, is to record distinctions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Immediately two names are needed where only one was needed before. This book will talk you through the most important of these distinctions. The book also looks at the methodology of philosophy, the most important of which, of course, is logic. 

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers explains complex ideas clearly, and is passionate about the need for reform.