Finalist for the 2020 Prose Awards (Language and Linguistics Category)
The emergence of transgender communities into the public eye over the past few decades has brought some new understanding, but also renewed outbreaks of violent backlash. In Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address Douglas Robinson seeks to understand the "translational" or "translingual" dialogues between cisgendered and transgendered people.
Drawing on a wide range of LGBT scholars, philosophers, sociologists, sexologists, and literary voices, Robinson sets up cis-trans dialogues on such issues as "being born in the wrong body," binary vs. anti-binary sex/gender identities, and the nature of transition and transformation. Prominent voices in the book include Kate Bornstein, C. Jacob Hale, and Sassafras Lowrey.
The theory of translation mobilized in the book is not the traditional equivalence-based one, but Callon and Latour's sociology of translation as "speaking for someone else," which grounds the study of translation in social pressures to conform to group norms. In addition, however, Robinson translates a series of passages from Finnish trans novels into English, and explores the "translingual address" that emerges when those English translations are put into dialogue with cis and trans scholars.

Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translating and Interpreting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and is one of the world's leading experts on translation. He is the author or editor of thirty books, including path breaking publications in translation studies such as The Translator's Turn (1991),Translation and Taboo (1996), Translation and the Problem of Sway (2011), and The Dao of Translation (2015), Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019), The Behavioral Economics of Translation (2023), Translation as a Form (2023), Priming Translation (2023), Translating the Monster (2023), and The Experimental Translator (2023).

List of Figures
Permissions
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Why Should Cisnormative Translation Scholars Care About Translation and Transgender?
Chapter 2. The Semiosphere Must Be Fed by at Least Two Languages
Chapter 3. New Worlds (the Emergence of the Unexpected): The Ecology of Gender as a Dissipative System
Chapter 4. Becoming-Trans: The Rhizomatics of Gender
Concludingly: (Peri)Performative Becoming-Queer
Notes
Works Cited
Index