Tymoczko is of Slovak descent through her grandmother, and grew up speaking English, Slovak, and Italian. She lived in her grandmother's house in Cleveland, Ohio at a time and place where "it was assumed that most people spoke at least two languages", and has stated that this upbringing strongly influenced her view of translation. She earned a bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College in 1965, majoring in Romance languages with a minor in biochemistry. After a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Aix-Marseille University, she returned to Harvard University for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1968 and completing her Ph.D. in Celtic and Romance languages and literatures in 1973. Her dissertation, The Personal Names in the Ulster Sagas: A Tool for Understanding the Development of the Cycle, was supervised by John V. Kelleher. After postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she became an assistant professor of Irish studies for the Five College Consortium in 1974, and in 1977 moved to the comparative literature department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, one of the Five Colleges.
Books
Tymoczko's first book, The Irish "Ulysses" was co-winner of the 1995 Book Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the American Conference for Irish Studies. The book argues that in Ulysses, James Joyce was seeking to create an Irish literature, and teases out many parallel passages from Ulysses to the Irish literary tradition that, according to Tymoczko, were deliberate references by Joyce. calls some of the comparisons stretched and suggests that many readers will not be convinced, but still calls it "a book that every Joycean must read". And although criticizes her style of reasoning, "from like to like", as being weak without a comparison of how many other things are also like, he nevertheless says that she "establishes beyond any quibble". supports her thesis as unsurprising, pointing to Joyce's later use of Irish texts in Finnegans Wake. Her next book forms a bridge between this early work on Irish literature and her later work on translation as a general topic. Translation in a Postcolonial Context was winner of the Michael J. Durkan Prize of the American Conference for Irish Studies for best book in Irish language and cultural studies. It studies multiple 19th- and 20th-century translations of old Irish literature, particularly concentrating on the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the ways in which these translations were colored by the context of the colonization and decolonization of Ireland. It also expresses a clear preference for literary translation over scholarly translation, as would later be exemplified by Seamus Heaney's. It is in her third book, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, that Tymocko clearly articulates her call for a new view of translation bringing greater diversity into its theory and practice. She argues that the view of translation as faithfully transmitting the original meaning of a text is only one way of looking at translation, stemming from its origin in the translation of the bible. Instead, following Gideon Toury, she argues that any text viewed within its culture as being a translation should be considered as one, that there are many types of translation, that the boundaries of what makes a translation are fuzzy and dynamic, and that viewing translation in this way can help bring a diverse and international viewpoint to the subject. Tymoczko is also the editor of:
