Testimony and Translation
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This article discusses some recent critical approaches to the translation of Holocaust testimony, looking in particular at the way in which genre expectations may affect the translator's decisions about how to make the text readable as testimony in the target culture. Engaging with theories of testimony as genre by Robert Eaglestone and Eva Lezzi, the essay explores translators’ prefaces to works by Stefan Szende, Lucie Adelsberger, Miklós Nyiszli, Anatoli Kuznetsov, and others, showing how these documents give us an insight into the tensions inherent in translating a testimony text into a new context in which views about the relationship of text to experience may be quite different.