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BOOK REVIEWS
Elbieta Wòjcik-Leese a
a
Jagiellonian University, Krakòw, Poland
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Book Reviews
Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account
Mona Baker. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 208. ISBN 10: 0-415-38396-X (pbk):
£20. ISBN 10: 0-415-38395-1 (hbk): £70. ISBN 10: 0-203-09991-5 (E-book): £20.
Since 1992, Professor Mona Baker from the Centre for Translation and
Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester has produced several
notable works on translation including In Other Words: A Coursebook on
Translation (1992) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (chief
editor, 1998) which have exerted a tremendous influence on those interested
in translation studies. Mona Baker’s latest publication, Translation and Conflict:
A Narrative Account (2006), rigorously examines the relation between transla-
tion, power and conflict from a narrative perspective and may constitute yet
another turning point in Translation Studies. This groundbreaking volume
demonstrates that translation is never merely a by-product of social and
political developments, but a part of the institution of war, and examines the
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57
58 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
former strategy, she explains how in The Slave-King (1833), the first English
translation of Victor Hugo’s novel Bug-Jargal (1826), with its troublingly
ambiguous portrayal of slavery, slavery is now modified into a dastardly
institution in need of eradication.
In Chapter 7, Mona Baker gives an insightful analysis and appreciation of
Walter Fisher’s influential narrative paradigm and points out its advantages: it
allows us to assess a narrative elaborated in a single text as well as diffuse
narratives that have to be pieced together from a variety of sources and media;
it can also be used to assess any narrative: ontological, public or conceptual,
whether elaborated by an individual or an institution. The author concludes
with a critical review of translation studies from a narrative perspective and
predicts the future development of this paradigm.
The main features of this book are as follows. (1) It successfully gives a
critical theoretical analysis, with rich corpus-based studies. (2) Many vivid
pictures and fresh examples are used and illustrated in the book. (3)
Suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter so as
to provide much more useful materials for those interested in translation
studies, intercultural studies, sociology and history. (4) The book cover is so
illuminating that it attracts a lot of readers.
Equipped with all the above-mentioned qualities, this book is all in all a
very useful and handy reference for learners and researchers interested in both
cross-cultural studies and translation studies. Therefore, it is strongly
recommended.
For children who do not master foreign languages, translations are the sole
means of entering into genuine contact with foreign literatures and cultures.
Owing to translators’ efforts, ‘children all over the world can step through the
magical looking-glass and venture into the beguiling world of Andersen’s
fairy tales and Alice’s unexpected, mind-boggling Wonderland, or can indulge
in the charmingly anarchistic fabrications of Pippi Longstocking, and more
recently the thrilling, often spine-chilling, universe of Harry Potter’ (p. v).
Today translating for children is increasingly recognised as a literary challenge
in its own right, because translators are not only mediators who facilitate the
negotiating ‘dialogue’ between source text and target audience, but also ones
who hold a fragile, unstable middle position between the social forces that act
upon them, their own interpretation of the source text and their assessment of
the target audience; translators mediate, but to an important extent they also
shape the image that young readers or listeners will have of the translated
work.
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and Italian, show that this double orientation (Rushdie’s novel can be read
both as a fairy tale for children and as a political critique aimed at an adult
readership) results in complex translation strategies. This raises a series of
interesting translation issues such as ‘the micro-structural co-ordination of
culture specificities, the macro-structural marketing policies dictating the
translating strategies of the political subcontext through metaphor’ (p. 157),
the status of the target reader, and the place of translators and translations
within the polysystem and the wider social system.
The book perfectly bridges the gap between theory and practice, which
makes its arguments even more convincing. It has benefited greatly from
theoretical developments in the fields of literary and translation studies, such
as Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, Gideon Toury’s concept of norms
of translational behaviour, Lawrence Venuti’s concept of the translator’s
(in)visibility and of foreignising and domesticating translations, Chesterman’s
prototypical approach and the concept of the child(hood) image. And it
applies the theories to such topics as the ethics of translating for children, the
importance of child(hood) images, the ‘revelation’ of the translator in prefaces,
the role of translated children’s books in the establishment of literary canons,
the status of translations in former East Germany, questions of taboo and
censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in
different translations of a Swedish children’s classic, the handling of ‘cultural
intertextuality’ in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy
books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions,
functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with
character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the
dual audience in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales and in Salman
Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
What impresses me most is that 10 out of the 12 authors are female, which
poses an interesting question: why are so many women engaged in studying
62 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
and translating children’s literature? To me, it might be due to their family role
in society, their psychological makeup and their great maternal love for
children.
The list of contributors at the end of the book not only offers their academic
background; it is also helpful for cross-national communication among
translation researchers and practitioners.
Now we are very interested in raising the translator’s status, but how? In
this book the essay ‘Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in Translation’ is
written by Anette Øster (in Danish) and translated by Don Bartlett. However,
the author’s name is put at the beginning of the essay and the translator’s at
the end. I don’t think it appropriate to treat the author and the translator
differently. I maintain that we translators or translation researchers ourselves
should be the first to put authors and translators in the same place because
they are of the same importance. If even we don’t do this, why should others? I
propose that both the author’s and the translator’s names should be placed at
the beginning of the essay in order to demonstrate their equal status. The
journals and books published in China such as Chinese Translators’ Journal set a
good example in this respect.
In conclusion, the anthology under review is extremely useful; it is one of
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the few books on children’s literature in translation, and it reflects the recent
developments in this special field. It offers excellent guidance and orientation
to students of children’s literature in translation, and although its essays
explore children’s literature in translation in a Western context, it is also of
great significance in an international context.
The book under review deals with one of the most topical present-day fields of
Translation Studies, i.e. the scholarly issues of court interpreting discourse. The
hypothesis underlying the author’s study is that ‘interpreters are mostly
concerned with maintaining accuracy of content alone, the ‘‘what’’ and not
the ‘‘how’’’ (p. 238). This hypothesis has determined the aim of the book, which
is seen in the analysis of the complex relationship between form and function
within the context of interpreter-mediated speech (p. 7). Hence, the main focus
of the monograph is the interpreting process delivery phase that, as the author
states, ‘has been perhaps the most neglected one in the study and training’ (p. 5).
The structure of the book is in concordance with the above aim and focus
and is as follows: Chapter 1. Court Interpreting: The Main Issues; Chapter 2.
Historical Overview of Court Interpreting in Australia; Chapter 3. Courtroom
Questioning and the Interpreter; Chapter 4. The Use of Discourse Markers in
Book Reviews 63
is assumed that there is a strong correlation between how people speak and
how they impress their listeners in terms of their social status, personality,
intelligence, trustworthiness and competence. Here she studies hesitations,
repetitions, backtracking, pauses and hedges as well as grammatical errors in
court interpreting discourse. Her data contain 1379 answers with a total
number of 15,053 Spanish words (pp. 87, 95, 96). Hale concludes that the
interpreted English shows a higher frequency of hesitations and grammatical
errors, while there are fewer repetitions, backtrackings, pauses and hedges in
the interpreted variant than in the original Spanish discourse. (I should like to
mention right here that after all, repetitions, errors, backtrackings, etc. are all
about hesitation: a speaker would not backtrack or make an understatement or
whatsoever in case he/she were confident of the subject in case. So the chapter
is positively about hesitations only, which should have been used as an
umbrella term.) Moreover, the author writes that interpreters tend to
constantly alter witnesses’ speech styles in their interpretations (p. 156).
A challenging chapter is about how to keep power and control in the
courtroom. If we accept the author’s approach, we should follow the following
path: ‘a person’s power lies in his/her ability to control his/her own actions,
and to control the actions of others, despite resistance. This book deals with the
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context of the courtroom, where there are clearly powerful and powerless
participants’ (p. 159), the former being the lawyers and the bench who can ask
questions and control the information, whereas the latter are witnesses, who
must answer the question without digressing from the relevant themes
(Atkinson & Drew 1979; Merry, 1990; Drew, 1992 as quoted in Hale: 160).
However, this seems to be the field of psychology rather than Translation
Studies or linguistics, although Hale states that ‘linguistic control has been
said to be one important aspect of exercising power over others’ (Morris, 1949;
Foucault, 1977; Pondy, 1978; Bourdieu, 1991 as quoted in Hale: 159). Of course,
we cannot do without the language in many fields, like philosophy, philology,
psychiatry, legal studies and psychology. Still, such issues are psychology, with
linguistics as a runner-up there. As if to support my line, the author goes on to
say that the ‘general rule is for all directive speech acts to originate with the
powerful participants of the courtroom’ (p. 162). However, the chapter
discloses that ‘although control is mostly held by the counsel, it sometimes
shifts to the witness, to the interpreter and to the magistrate. Such power shifts
were mostly a consequence of witness initiative and sometimes produced by
the presence of the interpreter’ whose presence may sometimes interfere
with the counsel’s strategies (p. 210).
The author then tries to support her findings in an experimental part where
she consults a group of interpreters through a questionnaire on the main issues
of her book, for example interpreter renditions of ‘now’, ‘you see’, ‘well’, tag
questions, etc. Hale’s conclusion at this part is as follows: the majority of
respondents claim witnesses’ incoherence and colloquial speech to be the main
cause of difficulty in interpreting. Generally, the results of the survey proved
more positive than those of the authentic courtroom hearings (pp. 232233).
As I have quoted above, the author’s two main questions are ‘what’ and
‘how’. So a logical follow-up will be the big question ‘why’. I often ask this
question which sounds irritating to some authors, for whatever reason.
Book Reviews 65
Anyway, I ask it to see what is there in the background that made the book
possible, for one thing. For another (and that is what I should like to ask of
Sandra Beatriz Hale), why has she thought it appropriate to put within one
volume topics that should rather go in different books? The major part of the
book is about ‘a micro analysis of questions and answers taken from Local
Court hearings’ (p. 211). Fine, so let the monograph be on this theme, entitled
‘Questions, Markers and Hesitations in Court Interpreting’. That would be
quite suitable for the contents, as ‘The Discourse of Court Interpreting’
followed by the subtitle ‘Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness and the
Interpreter’ is too general. The author deals with a very small part of the said
discourse; this book is not about the whole linguistic practice of lawmaking
and justice, as the author’s title may suggest.
My second ‘why’ or, to use the author’s term, my hesitation is about
psycholinguistic and psychological issues discussed in the book. I suppose
they deserve a separate volume on what people do in court to control the
situation. The methodology of the monograph the way it is can be defined as
eclectic, as it is a combination of Translation Studies methods and those of
linguistics, culture, psycholinguistics and even psychology. These are all very
different fields enjoying their own research topics, aims, tasks and methods.
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However, these comments are merely trifles. The book has impressed me as
a substantial study of courtroom interpreting practices by a knowledgeable
specialist.
Proust’s English
Daniel Karlin. London: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 229. ISBN 0-19-
925688-4 (hbk): £27, US$45. ISBN 0-19-925689-1 (pbk): £15.
text with intrusions like ‘home’ and ‘fishing for compliments’. The entry of
each Anglicism into French is fastidiously traced.
Karlin’s delight in deconstructionist etymologising is a further demonstra-
tion that stereoscopic reading and deconstruction form a felicitous critical ploy.
As for the semantic spaces between the French and the English, these appear in
ingenious backtracking that makes English not only a source of ‘mots retrouvés’,
but also despite vociferous calls for an uncontaminated French a source for
language enrichment.
If we hope to pick up tricks of the trade from ‘the best Latin American writer
in the English language’, as Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez complimented his
translator, we will soon be rather dismayed at the translation strategies
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intuition, the desirable characteristics of ‘brilliant amateurs’ (p. 68). They also
prove his humour, modesty and his unfailing respect for the authors he has
followed word by word.
papers published before and translated or rewritten for the present purpose.
A typical representative of the discourse on translation and culture in
China, this book is no doubt a forward step over the traditional anthro-
pologicallinguistic sense of culture and translation typically represented by
the overdue conventional addiction to Eugene Nida’s theory of translation
(Bassnett, 1998: 129132).
Wang Ning’s book consists of a tripartite body and an appendix. Part 1
centres on the issue of cultural translation. Sequentially discussed here are six
major issues, namely the translatology turn put forward as a way out for
cultural studies now commonly recognised as trapped in a bottleneck of
development (Ch. 1), the embedment of translation studies within cultural
studies for a full display of the dialogic and coordinative function of translation
in the context of globalisation (Ch. 2), the disciplinary status of translation
studies as a science (Ch. 3), the proposal of different levels of correspondence or
equivalence setting cultural translation as the ideal, though only partially
possible in real practice (Ch. 4), the reconstruction of China’s critical discourse
through theoretical translation (Ch. 5) and the role of diasporic writing
(especially in English) in accelerating the globalisation of Chinese literature
and culture (Ch. 6).
Part 2 moves on to the recanonisation in translation as the interpretation of
culture. Translation is here posed as a means to question and reconstruct the
literary canons. Picking up the three ways out proposed for cultural studies in
the first chapter of Part 1 (p. 12), Chapter 1 explores the canon formation in the
cultural interpretation (i.e. translation) of literature on the basis of a case study
of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Using English as a
reference point, Chapter 2 explores the role of the globalisation-driven
worldwide spread of Chinese in the rewriting process of the history of
Chinese literature and Chinese literatures. Chapter 3 elaborates on China’s
(post)modernity as the result of translation and hybridisation that are mainly
68 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
Notes
1. This immaturity is a deep-rooted problem of cultural studies and is duly admitted
by many scholars in the field. Wang Ning, though readily admitting the flaw, tends
to view it positively by partially crediting to it the prosperity of the whole field
(pp. 23, 238, 271). This positive spirit is an important prop for his dialectic
argument on globalisation, a source of not only challenges or conflicts but also
opportunities for dialogues (pp. 2022, 3839, 65, 7778, 110121, 141, 148153,
203207, 211214, 220236, 270).
2. It must be pointed out that, despite the affinity between Wang Ning’s translato-
logical turn and Bassnett’s translational turn in the same field of cultural studies,
we can find obvious difference between the two. While Wang Ning tends to at
least for the time being include translation studies in cultural studies, viewing
the former as a category under media studies, which in turn constitute a key part of
the latter in the context of globalisation (pp. 2223), Susan Bassnett is more
inclined to call for a translational turn in cultural studies from the perspective
of the ‘meeting’ (Bassnett, 2001: 132) of, or the ‘overlap’ (Bassnett, 2001: 136)/
’cooperation’ (Bassnett, 2001: 138) between translation studies and cultural studies.
In other words, what Bassnett looks at is the common ground between cultural and
Book Reviews 71
translation studies as two different and parallel fields. Yet this turn or common
ground metamorphoses itself in Edwin Gentzler’s interpretation into a joint, a
virtual merge of the two fields (Gentzler, 2001: xx). This ‘ambitious’ turn, whether
or not originally intended by Bassnett, is clearly very different from Wang Ning’s
turn.
3. Wang Ning is not alone in this pursuit. Similar significant calls come from two
other pioneers, Lu Gusun from Fudan University and Pan Wenguo from East
China Normal University, though each approaches the issue from a different
perspective. Viewed sociologically, Lu Gusun’s claim for the shift of emphasis is
made mainly from the rationalist perspective, aiming directly at the huge mass of
Chinese learners of English, while Pan Wenguo’s is mainly for the legitimacy of
this exodoric thrust in the spread to the world of classical Chinese works. These
three strains of thought deserve a parallel systematic study, which is however
beyond the scope of the present book review.
References
Bassnett, S. (2001) The translation turn in cultural studies. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere
(eds) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (pp. 123140) (Reprinted
from the edition of 1998 by Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.). Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Gentzler, E. (2001) Foreword. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures:
Essays on Literary Translation (pp. ixxxii) (Reprinted from the edition of 1998 by
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