Retranslation - Entry for ENTI – Encyclopedia of Translation and Interpreting Retranslation is the activity (and the result) of translating anew a source text into a given target language. Retranslation is therefore not to be taken here in the sense of translating a translation into a third language (indirect translation, or relay translation), nor of translating a text back to its source language (backtranslation). The publishing world widely prefers the term new translation to retranslation, highlighting the novelty of the operation rather than its repetition. However strange it may sound to do something anew when so many works are left untranslated, retranslation appears to be a constant phenomenon in the history of translation. And one that has spawned much interest in translation studies, especially since 2010, when a wave of new publications on the subject started to appear. Translation scholars have explored the various motives for retranslations: dissatisfaction, need for new interpretations, censorship, and especially the concept of “ageing” of translations. The latter proves to be a much-debated issue, and one which questions the status of translation as compared to original works (which, incidentally, are almost never “retranslated” intralingually into contemporary versions of the source languages). Several scholars have investigated translation series, i.e., a sequence of translation and retranslations into a given target language, in order to assess motives and frequency. The retranslation hypothesis, attributed to Berman in 1990, posits a retranslation pattern where first translations would be more target-oriented (in order to make the text acceptable in the target culture) and successive retranslations would be more and more source-oriented. Scholars have shown that such a hypothesis is simplistic at best, given the number of different socio-cultural factors which may determine the extent of retranslations, as well as their frequency and orientation. Much of the scholarship on retranslation has focused on literary or philosophical texts, which appear to be the preferred ground for such operations. All in all, retranslation is the perfect antidote to the idea of the existence of one perfect translation: no translation is final, and each one of them is a peculiar interpretation of the source text. Full entry: https://www.aieti.eu/enti/retranslation_ENG/entry.html