December 2006

(The short notes and comments associated with the items presented here are personal attempts to contribute useful information. In some cases, I have reproduced partly an abstract or presentation provided by the author or publisher. In others, the comments were made by me after reading the items. I acknowledge the subjective nature of my comments, take responsibility for errors and will gladly insert corrections at the request of authors. D. Gile)

MONOGRAPHS

Cheung, Martha (ed). 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester: St.Jerome.

* Translation has a long history in China. Down the centuries translators, interpreters, Buddhist monks, Jesuit priests, Protestant missionaries, writers, historians, linguists, and even ministers and emperors have all written about translation, and from an amazing array of perspectives. Such an exciting diversity of views, reflections and theoretical thinking about the art and business of translating is now brought together in a two-volume anthology. The first volume covers a time-frame from roughly the 5th century BCE to the twelfth century CE. It deals with translation in the civil and government context, and with the monumental project of Buddhist sutra translation. The second volume spans the 13th century CE to the Revolution of 1911, which brought an end to feudal China. It deals with the transmission of Western learning to China – a translation venture that changed the epistemological horizon and even the mindset of Chinese people.

Comprising over 250 passages, most of which are translated into English for the first time here, the anthology is the first major source book to appear in English. It carries valuable primary material, allowing access into the minds of translators working in a time and space markedly different from ours, and in ways foreign or even inconceivable to us. The topics these writers discussed are familiar. But rather than a comfortable trip on well-trodden ground, the anthology invites us on an exciting journey of the imagination.

COLLECTIVE VOLUMES

Ferreira Duarte, João, Alexandra Assis Rosa & Teresa Saruya (eds). 2006. Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

A volume which grew out of the conference “Translation (Studies): A Crossroads of Disciplines” held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in November 2002, one of the numerous meetings devoted to interdisciplinarity in TS.

Alves Veiga, Maria José. Subtitling reading practices. 161-168.

* A rather original idea: subtitling could be just as important, if not more important, to enhance native-language skills including reading skills, than to gain better understanding of a subtitled film. This might be one conclusion drawn from a questionnaire analyzed in this study, in which 293 Portuguese secondary school students answered questions about their reading habits (on the low to very low side as regards books, and on the high to the very high side as regards subtitled TV programs). A corollary would be that subtitling deserves to be monitored for language quality.

Assis Rosa, Alexandra. Defining target text readers. 99-109.

Bennett, Karen. Critical Language Study and Translation. 111-127.

* The author points out that norms of Portuguese academic texts are quite different from norms of English academic texts and that such differences generate a fundamental problems for translators. She also adopts a sociological view when she highlights the hegemonic position of English academic discourse and wonders whether it should be upheld or opened up to other types of discourse, lest the non-English speaking part of the world rebel and cause a collapse of the whole linguistic edifice of Western knowledge.

Chesterman, Andrew. Questions in the sociology of translation. 9-27.

* The main idea in this essay is that translation can be investigated as social practice, perhaps as opposed to linguistic practice, literary practice etc. Note that this places emphasis on the translation process as opposed to the translation product, and puts the translator at the centre of attention, as opposed to the product.

Gambier, Yves. Pour une socio-traduction. 29-42.

* Like Chesterman, Gambier makes the case for sociological study of translation, but also of TS as a discipline.

Klungervik Greenall, Annjo. Translation as dialogue. 67-81.

* Translation as analyzed in terms of Bakhtin’s philosophy.

Li, Xia. Institutionalising Buddhism. The role of the translator in Chinese society. 147-160.

* A historical overview around early translation of Buddhist texts in China.

Lopes, Alexandra. An Englishman in Alentejo. 169-184.

* Through the example of a Portuguese over-translation of an Englishman’s English novel set in a Portuguese environment, the author shows that conventional “fidelity” may result in a clumsy text and suggests that translators could take the liberty of not translating information that is perhaps necessary or interesting for readers of the original, but redundant and cumbersome for readers of the translation.

Martín Ruano, M. Rosario. Conciliation of disciplines and paradigms. A challenge and a barrier for future directions in translation studies. 43-53.

* The author argues that trying to integrate various approaches into one in TS is counter-productive, and that in view of the complexity, plural and multifaceted nature of translation, diversity is appropriate.

Martínez Soler, Dioniso. Lembranças e Deslembraças. A case study on pseudo-originals. 185-196.

Meylaerts, Reine. Literary heteroglossia in translation. When the language of translation is the locus of ideological struggle. 85-98.

* A sociological analysis about dominant and dominated cultures in translation, based on research on French translations of Flemish novels in Belgium during the 1920s and 1930s.

Toury, Gideon. Conducting research on a “Wish-to-Understand” basis. 55-66.

* An interesting contribution by a central personality in TS. Toury reiterates his position that some division of labour between scholars and groups of scholars is appropriate, with some teaching, some theorizing and some conducting empirical research. This overlaps to a substantial extent with Gile and other scholars’ categorization of LAP vs. ESP, with trainers doing a different kind of work. Another important point Toury makes is that much “existing knowledge” TS scholars claim to have is a set of imported assumptions from other fields of knowledge which are too simple to account for the complexity of translational phenomena, and recommends that such claims be re-qualified as assumptions or questions. In the last two pages of his papers, he lists pieces of advice which would fit in well into a book on basic methodology for empirical research. I wonder whether these questions are acceptable to all LAP scholars.

Wing-Kwong Leung, Matthew. The ideological turn in Translation Studies. 129-144.

* The author discusses the “ideological turn” in TS as one where the focus is not only on cultural issues, but on ideologically-oriented action through translation, and provides examples, inter alia from China. He then recommends Critical Discourse Analysis as a tool for the study of ideological aspects of translation.

ARTICLES

Brownlie, Siobhan. 2006. Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory. Across Languages and Cultures 7:2. 145-170.

Kanter, Ido, Haggat Kfir, Brenda Malkiel & Miriam Shlesinger. 2006. Identifying Universals of Text Translation. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 13:1. 35-43.

* Four 230 000 word corpora in English, one from the on-line edition of the International Herald Tribune and the three others from English translations of Greek, Israeli and Korean newspapers incorporated as local supplements to the IHT were analyzed with respect to their lexicon. The total number of different English words in the original English corpus was 7954 words. The total number of different English word in from-Greek corpus was 5185 words, and the total number of different English words in the from-Hebrew corpus was remarkably similar in size (5113 words). There were 2175 words common to the English original and to the From-Greek corpus, and almost the same number of words (2173) in the from-Hebrew corpus. The pattern is preserved when adding the from-Korean corpus. These and other quantitative findings are striking and invite further questions: are the patterns due to the fact that the content of the corpora is similar and of a particular type and/or to editorial decisions by coordinators of the translation team-work, or could they be generalized? If so, to what extent? Can language-specific trends be identified?

Nida, Eugene. 2006. Theories of translation. Pliegos de Yuste 4. http://fundacionyuste.org/acciones/pliegos/n4pliegos

Várady , Tibor. 2006. Language-related Strategies in Preparing Arbitration. Across Languages and Cultures 7:2. 209-226.