学界需要翻译，却将其边缘化，《翻译之耻》探索了翻译与学术界之间的紧张关系。作为专业译者，劳伦斯•韦努蒂提出，时下流行的作者观念在文学研究领域贬低了翻译，同时也强化了版权法中对“著作权”的不当定义。此外，针对各类学术机构对翻译的忽视，出版商对译者的不公正待遇，本书均给出了毫不留情的批评。
从早期基督教的《圣经》翻译，到日本现当代小说的翻译，韦努蒂的研究均有涉猎。他揭示了译本在构建翻译伦理的社会影响，并提出，翻译伦理促使译作以语言差异和文化差异这一更广阔的视角被写作、阅读和评价。

Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences?This study -- bridging contemporary theory Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies -- analyzes the historical interactions among China, japan. and the West in terms of "translingual practice." By this term, the author refers to the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arose, circulated, and acquired legitimacy in early modern China as it contacted/collided with European/Japanese languages and literatures. In reexamining the rise of modern Chinese literature in this context, the book asks three central questions: How did "modernity" and "the West" become legitimized in May Fourth literary discourse? What happened to native agency in this complex process of legitimation? How did the Chinese national culture imagine and interpret its own moment of unfolding?After the first chapter, which deals with the theoretical issues, ensuing chapters treat particular instances of translingual practice such as national character, individualism, stylistic innovations, first-person narration, and canon formation. The author reexamines the works of Lu Xun, Lao She, Shi Zhicun, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, and others in this light, and concludes by probing the unprecedented conditions under which Chinese writers and critics moved from confidence in the absolute centrality of their civilization to rethinking Chinese literature and culture as one among many national literatures and cultures.Inshort, what does it mean to be Zhongguo ren (men and women of the Middle Kingdom) in terms of what is not of the Middle Kingdom?An appendix lists and classifies over 1,800 loanwords and neologisms introduced into modern Chinese before 1950, the largest annotated collection to be found a