Like many other human activities, translation is related to different forms of power. It can be the ability to control and set the rules. With written translations of significant works of culture, it has often been the powerholders who supported and promoted or impeded them, depending on their own preferences or their understanding of the actual sociopolitical needs. The powerholders in question are individual or collective decision-makers at various levels of the sociopolitical hierarchy who determine policies and allocate funds for approved projects. This book focuses on the possiblities of various approches to translation and power as a research topic within Translation Studies.

This book is directed at lexicographers and professionals in Translation Studies and English Language Teaching. Chapters by translation scholars alternate with chapters by teachers of English; within them, sections on the contents of the works discussed alternate with sections on their use and/or usability. Each of the chapters offers a glimpse of interesting research possibilities that practice raises, the issues we need to investigate and explain, as well as how to turn some of this research into practical action. The book proves that dictionaries continue to play an important part in our daily and academic lives, though it is not always clear how they should fit into the overall pattern of curriculum design, teaching materials or learning styles.

Language as an essential and constitutive part of national identity is what obviously gets lost in translation, being substituted by the language of another nation. For this reason, one could perceive national identity and translation as contradictory and proclaim a total untranslatability of the former. However, such a simplified conclusion would clearly deny the actual translation practice, where countless successful attempts to preserve the element of national identity can be testified. The authors of the book focus on the possibilities of various approaches to national identity as a research subject within Translation Studies. The authors hope that the variety of topics presented in this book will inspire further research.

This book presents a wide range of topics and approaches in the nowadays Translation Studies, which includes popular, trendy issues as well as niche subjects that are rarely taken up in research. The chapters can be grouped into four thematic divisions that capture some major interests of translation scholars. They discuss the nature of the discipline as such and its dimensions, its development and tendencies in some countries, the process of translation from the perspective of translation practice as well as culture-specific elements in translation.

The viscerally haunting and politically disturbing Painted Bird, the most famous novel by the Polish-American writer, Jerzy Kosinski, finally receives a long overdue fresh scientific perspective: a truly insightful study of linguistic and cultural controversy in translation against the benchmark of a tailor-made iron-clad methodology of such concepts as involved culture, detached culture and the universe of the opus. The study presents the kaleidoscopic cross section of renditions into as many as thirteen languages, making it a pioneering elaboration of a macrocosm of the afterlife of a translated novel and a tour de force of comparative translation studies. The dark contents of the work, heavily loaded with political and moral issues, vulnerable to shifts and refractions in the process of translation, have been analysed, unaffected by ideological sway, debunking any persistent myths about Kosinski's harrowing work.