Alice in Many Tongues: Warren Weaver’s pioneering study 50 years on

Alice in Many Tongues (1964), the first book-length study of the translations of Alice in Wonderland, was an unprecedented documentation of the publishing history of Carroll’s novel and all its translations into, at that time, forty-seven languages. It also engaged with striking aspects of those translations through the method of back-translation. This talk will introduce its author, Warren Weaver, offer an appraisal of his innovative work in the context of its time and ask how, through the lens of contemporary translation studies, his methods and conclusions may be assessed today.