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Reviews
Valentin Shevchuk a
a
Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia
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139
REVIEWS
The translation process has been one of the focal points in Translation Studies
in the past fifteen years, and the present book addresses this complex problem.
The study offers many insights into the nature of the process of translation. The
author explores translation as text reproduction and provides detailed analyses
of the phases of the translation process, problems and complexities, strategies
selected, translation universals, and specifically explicitation. Readers find a
comprehensive, thorough and impressive analysis of the views among transla-
tion scholars on these issues.
The author concentrates on the translation process and the performance rep-
resented by the translation task, which is viewed as a monolingual writing task.
It is divided into three main phases, namely planning, text generation, and re-
vision. Yet, there are some differences in the distribution and the relative im-
portance of these phases when performances of mono- and bilingual tasks are
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compared. The book specifies and discusses the differences for each phase in
the translation process.
The author employs a combination of concurrent verbalizations, i.e. think-
aloud protocols and logging of the writing process by means of the computer,
for her empirical data collection and analysis. The text used was a Russian text
of 438 words that was translated into Swedish.
The results show that professional translators perform faster than beginners;
senior professionals are particularly outstanding in this respect – a conclusion
that is in striking contrast to earlier studies (by e.g. Jääskeläinen, Jakobsen, and
Krings). The author draws interesting conclusions regarding the relative alloca-
tion of time for different phases of the process, and she also finds a number of
prototypical patterns in professionals’ handling of literal translation.
In her discussion of explicitation as a translation universal, Englund Dimitrova
singles out two types of this phenomenon: norm-governed and strategic explici-
tation. She claims that the former is a function of the norm and is normally char-
acteristic of professional translations, whereas the latter is of an ad hoc nature
and usually occurs when solving specific problems in the course of the process,
thus showing more variation.
The author justly stresses that her conclusions are hypothetical because the
study involved only one language pair, a limited number of participants (nine),
and the source text was brief. She stresses that it was intended as a case study,
and consequently explorative and meant for generating hypotheses. Many con-
clusions made are therefore tentative and need to be further researched.
The book is a mine of important information about the specifics of how trans-
lation tasks are performed, and as such it is valuable to scholars, teachers and
translation trainees in higher learning.
Valentin Shevchuk,
Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia.
140 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
Krisztina Károly & Ágota Fóris (eds.) 2005. New Trends in Translation Studies.
In Honour of Kinga Klaudy. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. 218 pages. ISBN
963-05-8257-0. Price: HUF 6500; € 40 (hardback).
This volume is a tribute to Kinga Klaudy, the founder of translator and inter-
preter training programs at both graduate and postgraduate levels at univer-
sity, and one of the prime movers of Translation Studies in Hungary. As the edi-
tors, two of Kinga Klaudy’s former students and present-day colleagues put it
in their foreword, “Kinga Klaudy has obtained international reputation for her
original work in Translation Studies and has become widely recognized as one
of the most distinguished scholars of the field. She has devoted her life to the
study and teaching of translation and the establishment of Translation Studies
in Hungary.” It is not an overstatement to say that without her devoted efforts
over several decades, Translation Studies as well as the training of translators
and interpreters would be far less advanced than they are in Hungary today.
The aim of the volume, as the title suggests, is to give an overview of the state
of the art in Translation Studies, of its current trends, methods, and directions.
The authors are Kinga Klaudy’s Hungarian and foreign friends and colleagues.
Among the latter, we might mention Andrew Chesterman, Anthony Pym, Cay
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This impressive volume will surely be of great use to any scholar in the hu-
man and social sciences, and will certainly raise the interest at all levels of study
from undergraduates to established scholars. All readers should find topics of
utmost relevance to their own work and directions inspiring further research.
Sándor Albert,
University of Szeged, Hungary.
**********
The book is structured in three parts, each looking at the relation between
translation and identity in a different genre. In an introductory chapter pre-
ceding the three parts, Maria Sidiropoulou explores the overlapping areas of
translation and identity. She claims that identity is visible in the linguistically
inscribed preference in the construction of discourses and in language choice.
Genre discourses are highly conventionalized and thus minimize the role of
the receiver and sender as subjective agents in the production of texts. It is in
these conventions that Sidiropoulou finds the regularity that gives translation
researchers the opportunity to study aspects of linguistic preference across cul-
tures.
Linguistic identity is focused on through the notion of linguistic preference,
which is considered a manifestation of identity and as such contributes informa-
tion about target readership profiles. Linguistic preference refers in this book to
grammatical preference, to the culture-specific way in which a target language
conceptualizes universal notions, to assumptions about effective persuasion
strategies and about discourse style in relation to audience participation and
involvement.
The issue of equivalence in translation is discussed because equivalent target
versions allow for observation of preferred patterns of linguistic behaviour and
point to culture-specific assumptions in the alternative conceptualization of re-
ality, thus providing insight into the target language identity.
Part I, Inscription of Ideology in Press Translation examines preferences in the
translation of particular linguistic phenomena from the English to the Greek
press. Sidiropoulou takes as her point of departure the modifications of connec-
tives (adversative, causal connections) and time adverbials in news translation
for the study of mediation and the inscription of ideology in the target text. She
believes that awareness of potential differences between language pairs may
be enhanced by tracing the differences in the treatment of conjunctive cohesive
devices that ensure appropriateness in a target text.
142 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
Starting from the assumption that the cognitive and cultural aspects of the
nature of the metaphor are a central issue in the study of intercultural com-
munication, Sidiropoulou explores normative preferences in the translation of
metaphorical mappings in news reporting. Normative behaviour in the rendi-
tion of metaphors into Greek is influenced by cognitive parameters, such as
the assumed psychological remoteness of readers from the topic presented. She
thus concludes that the treatment of metaphors in news translation is ideologi-
cally constrained.
Part I concludes that “linguistic identities in news reporting are assumed to
be constructed through ideological assumptions prevalent in source and tar-
get versions of texts and reflected in discourses through linguistic realizations
generating the assumptions” (p. 85). The potential educational aspects of these
findings are underlined in that students should be made aware of the extent to
which source and target language structures carry ideological meaning across
and reflect audience profiles.
Part II, Readership Identities through EU Discourse Diversity, explores the poten-
tial of official versions of EU texts, in both English and Greek, to provide infor-
mation on linguistic identities. Although EU texts are not seen by the author as
a reliable source for the observation of linguistic identity, Sidiropoulou notices
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tribute its own point of view to the study of linguistic issues in order to clarify
common goals: intercultural understanding, linguistic identity awareness, etc.
In sum, Maria Sidiropoulou’s study of linguistic identity through translation
appeals to translation scholars, students and practitioners, as well as linguists
in general. She brings new aspects of translation and identity into focus and
formulates hypotheses that can serve as starting point for future research into
the shaping of identity through translation.
Xu Jianzhong
Technological University College, Tianjin, China.
**********
Rui Carvalho Homem & Ton Hoenselaars (eds.) 2004. Translating Shakespeare
for the Twenty-First Century. Amsterdam &-New York: Rodopi. 269 pages.
ISBN 90-420- 1721-X. Price: € 60.
The essays, almost all of them written by practising translators who are also
scholars in the field of translation studies, fall into two distinct parts, ‘Old and
New World Shakespeares,’ and ‘Portuguese Shakespeares – A Casebook.’ This
might lead readers to surmise that some tribute to the scholar and translator
Luis Cardim, who introduced Shakespeare’s unabridged texts to Portuguese
audiences in the early twentieth century, may have been the starting point of the
collection. If this should be accompanied by some suspicion that the Portuguese
part is likely to be less interesting, we would be completely wrong. With a pos-
sible qualification about Maria Afonso’s modest insistence on her not translat-
ing verse into verse because she is ‘not a poet’ and Gomes da Torre dismissing
theoretical writings as lacking practical relevance with the only exception of
Peter Newmark, contributors in this part too formulate illuminating comments
based on their translating experience.
Maria Joao Pires calls upon Berman, Jerome and Benjamin to comment on
her translation of Much Ado About Nothing and how she had to change the letter
of the text in order to convey its intention (which I think is the crux of the tired
pseudo-opposition between source- and target-oriented translations of literary
works); in a slightly grandiloquent manner she points to the parallel between
the process of creative writing and the process of translating, which “pushes
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the work out of the boundaries of the said into the creative energy where the
work was conceived, where the author’s dialogue with the infinite space of lan-
guage originally took place” (p. 188). Antonio Feijo provides critical insights
into the text of Hamlet as he emphasises the importance of understanding the
literal meaning of words first. Fatima Vieira points out that in Portuguese (as
in all Romance languages) Ariel’s indeterminate gender cannot be preserved,
while Rui Carvalho Homem explores Cleopatra’s ‘gypsiness’ and the potential
impact on audiences.
In the first part Serpieri outlines such a daunting task for Shakespeare’s
translators that it is truly a source of wonder that as many should still ven-
ture into such mined territories. Shurbanov interrogates the possibility of
translating Shakespeare into Bulgarian, with special reference to humour and
to power relations. Déprats, who has now acquired a leading position as a
translator of Shakespeare into French both for the stage and for the page, com-
pares the respective merits of translations from a historical or from a modern
standpoint, concluding that the modern approach conveys the immediacy that
Shakespeare’s audiences would have experienced, and is thus closer to histori-
cal truth, too. Hoenselaars brings together the very first performances / adap-
tations of Shakespeare’s plays into the Low Countries in the first half of the
seventeenth century and current developments that similarly tend to empha-
sise contemporary cultural and political relevance. Delabatista combines theo-
retical considerations with a historical survey of shifts in translating fashions
(with Dutch translations as his corpus), contrasting philological orthodoxy and
‘contemporary acculturation’. Maik Hamburger considers the translator’s work
on language, and particularly on metrial patterns and deviant occurrences.
Verdaguer discusses Moratin’s late eighteenth-century Spanish translation, and
how in spite of his many misgivings or downright objections to Shakespeare’s
tasteless departures from classical rules (which he abundantly illustrated in his
notes) he still provided a remarkably close rendering of the original text. Using
146 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
his experience of Brazilian productions, Roberto O’Shea examines the traps and
pitfalls of stage rendering: what will be heard? how can we avoid the most un-
wanted comic echo of an advert in the translation of a line of words like ‘free
for ever’?
To sum up, this is the kind of book that is worth much more than what a blasé
critic might tend to think at first. Even though the field explored has already
been extensively covered, it adds significant material that is valuable both to
literary critics and to students of translation. Whether it can be at all useful to
translators is another matter, which applies to all forms of meta-translation. I
think it can, but is there world and time?
Christine Pagnoulle,
University of Liège, Belgium.
**********
The starting point of the volume under review, which originated from a con-
ference held at the University of Hull in 1997 entitled True to Form: On Stage
Translation, is the conundrum that is the study of theatre translation in Britain.
While for centuries theatre has been the most receptive of all art forms to foreign
ideas and works – to a much larger extent than publishing, film or television
– the practice of translation and the figure of the translator have hardly been
considered at all by practitioners and scholars alike (p. 2). British sensibility has
tended to underplay rather than explore the foreignness of its inspirations and
sources, with a consequent preference for translation practices geared towards
domestication, appropriation and cultural relocation. This book is a very wel-
come and much needed first step in exploring the role of translation in theatre
production.
With the aim of celebrating ‘the neglected art’ of translating for perform-
ance (p. 12), editor Carole-Anne Upton opens the floor for a discussion of trans-
lation for the theatre which encompasses theatre practitioners, scholars and
translators working from a variety of languages and cultural specificities: from
the censorship of the German Democratic Republic (pp. 127-139), through the
use of dialect translation in Scotland and Quebec (pp. 25-35) to the untranslat-
ability of culture-specific referents or ‘realia’ of Eastern European theatre (pp.
139-151). Although the 12 contributions in the book are grouped into three sec-
tions – Identifying the target; Translating performance and Sources of resistance – a
number of key themes seem to run across the papers beyond these groupings
and develop into a debate which is of crucial concern to theatre, translation and
performance studies.
The first of these themes is the question of terminology. The difficulty in pin-
ning down the methodological and conceptual differences between producing
a ‘translation’ and an ‘adaptation’, indicated by the translation scholars Susan
Bassnett (Bassnett 1985) and more recently Sirrku Aaltonen (Aaltonen 2000),
Reviews. 147
complicity with the audience which David Johnston has already championed in
previous writings on translation for the stage (Johnston 1996) continues to fea-
ture prominently among his concerns in his dazzling article on the translation
of Spanish playwright Valle-Inclán (p. 90). Through the use of a language that
emphasises disfluency, Valle-Inclán creates a relationship of simultaneous en-
gagement and distance with the spectator which is rendered by Johnston with
a series of devices to maintain the stage-audience complicity while still preserv-
ing the foreignness of the source culture (pp. 89-90).
Another strand of this collection which taps into current concerns of thea-
tre and performance studies is the tendency of translation for performance
of working against the fixity of the written text. Kate Cameron addresses the
question of the semiotic tension between written text and performance (Elam
2003) in her work on the translation and mise en scéne of French feminist writer
Hélène Cixous, by showing how an improvisational strategy, based on voice
and speech rhythm, is closer to the féminine unconscious of Cixous and thus
produces a target performance that is closer to the original text and to the politi-
cal agenda behind it (p. 101). The relationship between text and performance is
then picked up again by Mark Batty in his meticulous study of Samuel Beckett’s
self-translation. Here the debate moves to questions of competing authority of
textuality and performance (Rouse 1992). Batty shows Beckett as an author who
situates himself between written and performance text, exercising authority
over both form and content and producing plays that ‘contain, within the black
ink on white paper of their written texts, the patterns and frameworks for their
performance text’ (p. 71).
In a passage that seems to invite the application of functional theories to
translation for performance, Upton reminds us that translation strategy is deter-
mined by reception aesthetics (p. 8). However, when between the culture doing
the reception and that being received there is a history of colonialism and im-
migration, the values negotiated through translation go well beyond aesthetic
148 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
Works cited
Aaltonen, S. 2000. Time-sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society.
Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.
Bassnett, S. 1985. Ways Through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for
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Cristina Marinetti,
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick.
**********
some influential empirical studies. Thanks to his intimate familiarity with the
field of enquiry and his thorough and critical reading of the relevant literature,
Pöchhacker is able to single out ‘Process’, ‘Product and performance’, ‘Practice
and profession’, and ‘Pedagogy’ as the four major topics that have attracted con-
siderable academic interests to date, and devotes a chapter to the discussion of
each of them. Focusing on process-oriented research, which is mainly informed
by cognitive sciences, Chapter 6 draws our attention to insights generated from
studies on bilingualism, simultaneity, comprehension, memory, production,
input variables, and strategies. Chapter 7 looks at investigations into interpreting
as a product and a communicative event. The notions of discourse, source-target
correspondence, effect, role and quality are highlighted as the useful conceptual
tools to analyze the interpreter’s product and performance. As an academic
enquiry into a profession with an obvious service function, interpreting research
takes its origins and inspirations in the personal accounts of the first generation
of self-taught interpreters. However, with the increasing professionalization of
interpreting, there emerges a similarly increasing trend in empirical research
in this respect. Hence, Chapter 8 explores the profession-oriented literature
in terms of history, settings, standards, competence, technology, ecology, and
sociology. Passing on the knowledge and skills of interpreting to the next
generation has been one of the overarching concerns of those involved in the
training of interpreters ever since interpreting became a recognized profession
in the early twentieth century. Considering the fact that most literature in this
domain is concerned with personal experience of the organization of interpreting
classes and that little systematic research has been generated so far, Pöchhacker
identifies five areas that merit the attention of interpreter educators, namely
curriculum design, selection, teaching, assessment, and meta-level training.
Part III, ‘Directions’, which is made up of a stand-alone chapter, winds up the
survey of the field by analyzing its current trends of development, pinpointing
the critical issues that are going to influence the growth of interpreting studies,
150 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
and providing orientation for aspiring students dedicated to the study of inter-
preting. Pöchhacker believes that the two words that best summarize the current
trends in the evolution of the field are Growth and Convergence. Nevertheless,
the field is confronted with six critical issues (i.e. manpower, motivation, means,
market, methods, materials) and two ‘mega-trends’ such as globalization and
technologization, which inevitably exert a great influence on the movement of
the field from quantitative to qualitative methods of inquiry. In the final section
of the book, a basic orientation about how to get started in interpreting research
and how to get help is offered to those who are new to the field, but about to
make a contribution to the existing body of knowledge in interpreting studies.
One of the most outstanding features of the book is that it provides a
comprehensive ‘map of the interpreting studies landscape’ (p. 205) by charting
out the theoretical domain of the field, reviewing the state-of-the-art, and
projecting future directions. If it is not improper to say that previous research
into interpreting is more on an ad-hoc basis and reflects personal preferences,
then the present volume testifies to the ascendancy of the young discipline
by carrying out a systematic review in a detached manner and presenting us
with a surprisingly rich body of literature. The wealth of literature is a two-
edged sword. Confronted with such a tremendous wealth of information, a
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Wang Shaoxiang,
Foreign Languages Institute, Fujian Teachers University, Fuzhou, China.
**********
This books deals with vehicular accident lawsuits (i.e. lawsuits following traffic
accidents), the most common type of lawsuit in the United States of America.
It is primarily intended for court interpreters who are not fluent – or at least
not confident of their fluency – in English. This makes the book both topical
and relevant for multilingual and multicultural migrant communities in many
countries, since cross-cultural and cross-language migration and consequently
interaction are found in many parts of the world.
Although there is a number of books on legal translation and interpreting on
the Translation Studies market, Josef F. Buenker’s work offers a new field with
its clear focus on vehicular accidents and thereby fills a gap in the literature oth-
erwise concerned with e.g. court interpreting, translation of official legal docu-
ments, etc.
152 2006. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. Volume 14: 2
The book is structured in the following sections and chapters: Preface; ‘An
Introduction to the Vehicular Accident Lawsuit’; ‘Types of Vehicular Accident
Lawsuits’; ‘Participation of the Interpreter in Vehicular Accident Lawsuits’;
‘Recurring Witnesses and Potential Testimony’; ‘Non-Recurring Witnesses’;
‘Expert Witnesses’; and Appendices.
The book covers a very wide range of vehicular lawsuits, e.g. auto-auto ac-
cidents, auto-pedestrian accidents, auto-truck accidents, livestock accidents (p.
12-28); it has a fine definition of the term “vehicular accidents’ (p. 10) and even
specifies what is meant by a number of related legal notions, such as ‘unin-
sured motorists claims’ (p. 28-29), ‘product liability’ (p. 29), and clarifies what
may follow design and manufacturing defects (p. 29-31). All this is necessary
background knowledge, which Josef F. Buenker, a practicing lawyer, himself
possesses in abundance. He is thus well qualified to provide all the vehicular
legal information that might be of importance to newcomers to interpreting. It
is certainly praiseworthy that specialists in fields other than Translation Studies
try their hand in the complicated area of translation.
Among other things, Josef F. Buenker reminds readers of rules that are some-
times overlooked by professional interpreters as petty, although he calls atten-
tion to the fact that they are sometimes quite significant: it is pertinent that “the
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interpreter should sit between the court reporter and the witness, because the
court reporter will be listening to the interpreter and not the witness” (p. 50);
it is also worth stressing that “it is necessary to interpret the response for each
individual, even if they respond in unison. If the interpreter has six settling
individuals responding ‘Yes’, she must say ‘yes’ six times” (p. 59); it is equally
important that “the interpreter must be familiar with the translations of ranks
and titles into English” when “called to travel to a foreign country to interpret
the testimony of the responding and investigating police officers” (p. 93). If we
try to construct a hierarchy of rules and consider those cited minor ones, the
basic rule for interpreters should be: “you should not have any information that
is not told to the attorney” (p. 34).
It is slightly exasperating that the author repeats himself or at least states the
same idea again, although the intention may be to make sure that readers take
note. For example, Buenker mentions note-taking skills as a means of keeping
track of information and the best means of ensuring that interpreters do their
job conscientiously (pp. 34 and 37). The cliché that an interpreter serves as a
“conduit between the interviewer and the party … for questions and answers”
is encountered on both pages 33 and 50.
The book’s forte is the author’s clear definitions of such courtroom terms as
‘hearsay’ (p. 77), ‘mental anguish’ (p. 75), ‘physical and mental impairment’
(p. 69-70), ‘intersectional collision’ (p. 96), even when the terms are used exten-
sively in everyday language, for example ‘jay-walking’ (p. 98), or a ‘black box’
(p. 101).
The appendixes contain illustrative legal language material: there are twelve
examples, including ‘the Plaintiff’s original petition’, ‘the Defendant’s original
answer’, ‘the Defendant interrogation of the Plaintiff’, ‘Medical authorization’,
etc., with ‘the Jury’s verdict’ to crown it all.
In sum, since courtroom interpreting is one of the dominant interpreting
fields, and the number of people involved in and affected by it grow day by
Reviews. 153
day, I find that this book ought to have a large professional audience among
court interpreters, practicing lawyers, and translation scholars.
Vladimir Khairoulline,
Bashkir State University, Ufa, Russia.
**********
the foreign missionaries, while doing their missionary work, brought science
to China. The fact that many foreign missionaries came to China also demon-
strates that China has been a magnanimous country, which, in my opinion, lays
a solid foundation for China’s quick development.
It was a common practice in translation from Chinese that the translators
were mainly foreign missionaries in China or sinologists who once worked in
China. An early example of this was Martino Martini (1614-1661), an Italian
missionary coming to China in 1643, whose masterpieces are Sinicae Historix
Decas Prima and Novus Atlas Sinensis, published in Amsterdam in 1659 and in
1655. Of the many famous translators since then, a more recent exponent of the
trend is Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak (1889-1954, Dutch sinologist, coming
to China in 1912).
Why so many foreigners did their translation (in collaboration with Chinese
scholars) in China remains fascinating. Even in modern times, China was way
behind the western countries, but most Chinese still believed that China was the
greatest. We know this from the very name of the country, Zhong Guo, which
means ‘the country in the centre of the world’. Hence, it was usually thought
unnecessary for Chinese to learn foreign languages. Still, many Chinese schol-
ars knew the realities and tried to make their country strong by learning from
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the West – and by making friends with the missionaries and cooperating with
them in their translation activities.
Translation from Chinese was mainly done by sinologists from other coun-
tries. Among the few Chinese translaters were Gu Hongming (1857-1882) and
Lin Yutang (1895-1976), who both studied and worked in other countries for
many years. Chinese interpreters could do two-way interpreting, but it was
hard for them to translate both ways, which proves a saying: The great achieve-
ments in translation lie in translating into the mother tongue.
There is usually a slight blemish in white jade, and this book is no exception.
The History of Science Translation in China lacks the period from 220 to 581, that
covers the Three Kingdoms, the Western and Eastern Jin Dynasties, and the
Northern and Southern Dynasties in Chinese history, and it discusses only little
military, educational and science communication. It is our hope that Li, on the
basis of the book, would explore much more historical data, in order to make a
more profound contribution to the study of the history of translation in China.
Still, Li’s book deserves much praise, as it is the first attempt at charting the
long history of translation in China. By doing this, it is a great contribution to
translation history studies in the world.
Xu Jianzhong,
College of Foreign Languages, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, P. R. China.
Reviews. 155
giving the reader genuine opportunity to come to grips with major concerns of
a given period.
In the section on the Reformation and Renaissance we meet, among others,
Martin Luther, William Tyndale, Etienne Dolet, Joachim du Bellay, Sir Thomas
North, John Florio, George Chapman, Philemon Holland, Sir John Denham,
Abraham Cowley, women translators from the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen-
tury, John Dryden, Anne Dacier, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William
Cowper and Alexander Fraser Tytler.
In the section on the nineteenth century we read about Goethe, Schleiermacher
and R. H. Horne, and we get reviews of translations from German into English
by e.g. Abraham Hayward and James Clarence Mangan, including George
Eliot’s review of the English translation of Kant’s Critik der reinen Vernunft. The
section also includes extracts from John Stuart Blackie’s translations of classical
works as well as texts about the famous Homer translations by F. W. Newman
and Matthew Arnold. The last two subsections focus on Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Edward FitzGerald, Robert Browning, Richard Burton, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and James Fitzmaurice-Kelly.
In the section “From Pound to Nabokov” the following people are on the
agenda: Ezra Pound, Constance Garnett, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber and
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Franz Rosenzweig, Jorge Luis Borges, Roman Jakobson, Jíří Levý, Eugene Nida,
Robert Lowell, Stanley Burnshaw, Laura Bohannan and Vladimir Nabokov.
The last section on recent and contemporary writings include George
Steiner, James S. Holmes, Itamar Even-Zohar, André Lefevere, Mary Snell-
Hornby, Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg, Louis and Celia Zukofsky,
A. K. Ramanujan, Gayatri Spivak, Talal Asad, Eva Hoffman, Gregory Rabassa,
Suzanne Jill Levine, Ted Hughes, Douglas Robinson, Lawrence Venuti, Susan
Bassnett, Everett Fox, John Felstiner, W. S. Merwin, Edwin Morgan and finally
– Seamus Heaney. Before this review evolves into pure name-dropping, I think
this list will do as an ample sketch of the span of the book. Now I turn to my
considerations and evaluation.
On the whole, Weissbort and Eysteinsson’s collection is nothing less than
magnificent – both in terms of its size and of its scope. It is most refreshing
to read translation theories and critiques as outcomes of practical experience
and hard work, and not just as airy, detached, philosophical speculations. The
collages work beautifully, even though some of the editors’ introductions and
presentations of translators are too brief and fragmentary.
It is highly original to constantly pick up on the theme of the Babel mythos
throughout the book, even though it seems to get “lost in translation” in the sec-
tion on the present. Seamus Heaney is definitely a fascinating translator at the
moment, but it would have been more appropriate to end with a contemporary
translator working with the Babel story – to come full circle from the beginning
to the end.
However, another story gradually unfolds in the course of the book. And that
is the story of the two traditionally opposing strategies of translation: word-for-
word or sense-for-sense. It is almost possible to make a long list categorising
most of the translators into advocates of either one or the other. The interesting
paradox is just that with the Romantic Revolution there is a return to the stiff,
old ideals of word-for-word translations, but this time it is out of respect for
Reviews. 157
Ida Klitgård,
Center for Translation Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
**********
Politics is actually the dominant rhetoric in the book and proves to be effec-
tive in fostering political knowledge of the trainees besides their professional
awareness.
Nolan’s presents a rare in-built image of the conditions of interpretation in
the market, becoming a source of inspirations for the field researchers who usu-
ally have to consider the whole matter at a distance.
It furthermore appears to be a success in identifying moments of truth in the
profession besides providing every solution at hand, not forgetting however to
share the debate with budding interpreters by making them engaged to find
solutions of their own. However, it is slow to allow trainees to check their own
learning.
Nolan here and there provides his path-breaking suggestions to tackle tricky
situations. For example, to tackle untranslatable themes he suggests writing out
strings of related words and ideas to help create necessary association in mind
(p. 60). Nolan has likely conjured up these precious personally devised solu-
tions in grapple. If only they were more.
The size of the chapters more reflects the expanse of literature available to
the author on those topics, or rather the author’s own fields of interests, than
the urgency of the problem. As an instance, a third of the entire book discusses
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Figures of Speech or Diction and Register, whereas at the end of the slim chapter
twelve, Quotations, Allusions and Transposition, I for one still had thirst to cover
more material.
Nolan on some occasions apparently approaches the profession from the
rather exclusive, though instructive set of qualifications required in the UN ses-
sions and missions, thereby risking to dwarf the generality suggested by the
title of the book.
Chapter 1 could have been titled oratory as it harbors an expertise far more
complex than speaking as a language-learning skill. Besides, it could embed
chapter 10, Formal Address, though the latter itself could be lengthier.
The chapter themed Complex Syntax might become further inclusive by pro-
viding some note or exercise tip on how to handle left-branching structures,
notably verb-last sentences featured among others in Persian SOV word order
as opposed to SVO word order of the European languages. Nevertheless, be-
ing a polyglot, Nolan has effectively set up a comparative analysis between the
European languages in terms of linguistic complexities.
As regards exercises, the strategies Nolan offers had probably proved effec-
tive to him, but one may ask how much they help bring about the intended skill
in the trainees and not just make them conscious about what is required.
The void of a separate chapter on ethical issues is badly felt, and I think
Nolan was intentional not to do so, especially for his preference to view political
correctness from the prism of Diction and Register (p. 127). Nonetheless, scattered
tips can be found across the chapters. These include whether or not to omit im-
polite language (p. 68), teamwork and interaction (p. 98), and how to respond
to possible corrections from the speakers (pp. 111-2), all tackled under Figures of
Speech, how to correct speakers’ wrongly made statements under Argumentation
(p. 118), and how to cope with controversial subject-areas (p. 161) under Diction
and Register.
While the urgency of time has been paid a solemn homage under Diction and
Reviews. 159
Register (p. 137), it seems to me that Nolan has left many stones unturned in dis-
cussing meta-translation skills, including among others how to boost recalling
power or long-term memory.
Nolan has begun some chapters with such debates that roughly fit the drill-
based and tip-oriented mode of the book. Almost no negative implication would
arise if the chapter seven began from the second paragraph, not bothering an
academic discussion about how figures of speech develop. This becomes even
further contentious when the author takes on the controversial theme of lan-
guage relativity to introduce origins of untranslatability, but quickly arrives at
conclusions. In my opinion, theoretical discussions may prove unyielding for
such tip-woven books. Besides, the audience, as the author himself emphasizes
(p. 1), is assumed to include students who have mastered among others the
fundamentals of translation, and if so, they are certain to have tackled these
theoretical discussions.
Finally, a new edition could revise several typesetting errors like “world” for
“word” (p. 58, line 3), “by” for “be” (p. 67, line 7), and “page 72” for “page 71”
(p. 82), where the author refers to Einstein’s parable.
To conclude, Nolan’s book is a veritable primer for interpretation, but one
still in progress.
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Ali Hajmohammadi,
IRIB News Agency, Iran.