Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. A scholar of language, literature, translation, and rhetoric, and a translator from Finnish to English since 1975, he is author most recently of Schleiermacher's Icoses (Zeta Books, 2013), The Dao of Translation (Routledge, 2015), The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle (SUNY Press, 2015), Semiotranslating Peirce (Tartu Semiotics Library, 2016), and Exorcising Translation (Bloomsbury, 2017), and editor of The Pushing Hands of Translation and its Theory (Routledge, 2016).

This book introduces Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation to Translation Studies (TS) scholars. A term first used by Lydia Liu in her list of research interests, CTS is based perhaps on the model of Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Legal Studies, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario.

Critical Theses on Translation 1: Sakai Circa 1997

1. Liu Reading Marx

2. The Double-Bind of Translation Quality Assessment

Critical Theses on Translation 2: Sakai and Solomon Circa 2006

3. Walter Benjamin's Intentions

4. What One Reads When One Reads Heidegger

5. The Socioecological Thought of Laozi and Mengzi

Critical Theses on Translation 3: Solomon Circa 2014

Conclusion