LINGUIST List 22.3744 Mon Sep 26 2011 Review: Translation: Baker, Olohan & Calzada Pérez (2010) Editor for this issue: Rajiv Rao <rajivlinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Vilelmini Sosoni , Text and Context Message 1: Text and Context Date: 26-Sep-2011 From: Vilelmini Sosoni <Vilelminihotmail.com> Subject: Text and Context E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-4756.html EDITORS: Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan, and María Calzada Pérez TITLE: Text and Context SUBTITLE: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason PUBLISHER: St Jerome Publishing YEAR: 2010 Vilelmini Sosoni, Ionian University SUMMARY ''Text and Context'' is a tribute to Ian Mason's influential scholarship and key contribution to translation and interpreting over the course of several decades. The edited volume brings together fourteen articles on a variety of translation issues, some by established scholars and others by young researchers, but all inspired by Ian Mason's inclusive approach to translation. The book is divided into four sections. The first is entitled ''Language Matters'' and includes two contributions which focus on interpreting and close linguistic analysis of particular textual features. Cecilia Wadensjö, in the first article entitled ''Expanded and Minimal Answers to Yes/No Questions in Interpreter-mediated Trials'', offers a comparative analysis of sequences drawn from two interpreted-mediated (Swedish-Russian) court trials. The findings of her analysis suggest that both questioning and answering strategies are bound to function somewhat differently in face-to-face interpreter-mediated court trials compared to single-language ones. In addition, Wadensjö demonstrates that defendants depend on the active support of interpreters when trying to gain and secure conversational space, while at the same time they are relatively independent of the immediate sanctions of the legal questioners. In the second article, entitled ''Information Structure, Management and Textual Competence in Translation and Interpreting'', Stuart Campbell, Ali Aldahesh, Alya' Al-Rubai'i, Raymond Chakhachiro and Berta Wakim focus on information structure management as a key aspect of textual competence in translation and interpreting. Their study looks at the rather neglected aspect of sentence opening in language patterning in translation and interpreting from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) into English as a second language (L2 English). More specifically, it compares the output of three students and three professional translators/interpreters in three different production modes: fast translation (i.e. a quick translation, without the use of dictionaries or other aids and without revision), consecutive interpreting (i.e. interpretation of a passage with note-taking) and scaffolded speech (i.e. composition of a speech on a given topic and on the basis of specific talking points). The findings, which reveal that sentence openings are different in fast translation and consecutive interpreting and between students and professionals, are in line with the predictions of the Translation-Interpreting Continuum (Campbell and Wakim, 2007), and underscore the importance of using text-based diagnosis and amelioration of problems with determiners when designing translation curricula. It is noteworthy that in the case of consecutive interpreting, the findings suggest that curricula should focus on developing the students' capacity to build an argumentative plan, a content plan, and a sense of audience. The second section of the book is entitled ''Forms of Mediation'' and focuses on the role of translators as mediators, a key concept in Mason's scholarship; all three articles explore the presence of the translator in the text. In the first article, Theo Hermans draws on Relevance Theory and Hallidayan linguistics to investigate ''The Translator as Evaluator''. He attempts to distinguish between the mimetic nature of translation and the modality that informs it. He argues that in order to understand the social functioning of translation, we need to focus on the translated text as it reaches its audience, independently of the original, and he investigates a number of concepts which help us identify the nature of the mediating role of the translator. In the second article, Jeremy Munday also draws on Hallidayan linguistics, in particular systemic functional linguistics, as well as on Hatim and Mason's (1997) notions of mediation and static-dynamic cline of language use, in order to talk about ''Evaluation and Intervention in Translation''. In his article, he analyses the translator's intervention in the text and argues that evaluative interpretations of a text can depend on the different readings to which the particular text may be subjected, i.e. factual, resistant or compliant, as defined by Martin and White (2005: 206). Offering examples from a broad range of genres -- tourist texts, a political manifesto and a short story -- he investigates how translators feed in their ideological perspective to a text. In the section's final article, Brian Mossop revisits Mason's notion of moves and uses it in translation -- rather than in interpreting as Mason does -- to refer to 'conscious mental acts', i.e. 'events' in the translator's mind. He claims that any move on the part of the translator may be accompanied by a change of footing between the roles of Motivator and non-Motivator (i.e. there is a chance that a translator stops being a non-motivating Composer/Transmitter and becomes a Motivator), and he posits that the role of Motivator can be described in terms of four types of reporting: Plain, Reconstructive, Summary and Active. Mossop also offers a reworking of the traditional distinction between translation and adaptation on the basis of an analysis of a passage from Thucydides in English translation. The third section of the book, entitled ''Institutional Context & Individual Agency'', includes contributions inspired by Mason's position that institutional approaches to translation constitute ''a neglected factor within the field of translation studies'' (2004: 470). The focus of the first paper entitled ''Negotiating Identities in the European Parliament: The Role of Simultaneous Interpreting'', by Morven Beaton-Thome, is on simultaneous interpreting between German and English in the European Parliament. In particular, it sets out to explore the effect that simultaneous interpreting has on identity construction and negotiation on the basis of a detailed comparative analysis of the use of 'we'. It also examines the role that 'we' plays in the construction and negotiation of 'in-and out-group identities'. The main findings of the study underscore the trend towards an intensified use of the inclusive 'we' to refer to the parliamentary community and the European Union, at the expense of more peripheral identities, such as national, regional and political. Simultaneous interpreting is thus revealed to strengthen the dominant institutional presence, ideology, and identity. Like Beaton-Thome, Kaisa Koskinen explores institutional translation in the context of the European Union. Her contribution, entitled ''On EU Communication 2.0: Using Social Media to Attain Affective Citizenship'', investigates the communication methods and the social media used by European Union institutions, in particular the European Commission, and sheds some light on the impact that their use has on institutional translation. She claims that e-participation and the use of various web-based communication strategies are closely tied with the audiovisualization of EU communication and localization, which necessarily alter the translation landscape in the EU. According to Koskinen, this trend towards multimodal web-based communication -- which aims at creating affinity and affection -- will become stronger in the future in the field of institutional translation, and together with the surge of English as the lingua franca in the EU, will demand new translator competences, such as expertise in multimedia translation. The development of such competencies, she concludes, will be a challenging task for training institutions and the EU itself. In the next article, entitled ''Positioning and Fact Construction in Translation: Intertextual and Translational Chains in Newsweek Korea'', Ji-Haen Kang explores institutional translation, but moves away from the EU and focuses instead on the translation of political texts in news media settings, where discourse is mediated and recontextualized. She investigates the way in which an interview of the South Korean president, Roh Moo Hyun, is recontextualized first into a Newsweek article and then into an article for Newsweek Hankukpan, the South Korean edition of Newsweek. Her findings suggest that while the Newsweek article presents Roh Moo Hyun as uncooperative and anti-American, Newsweek Hankukpan places emphasis on his views rather than on his personality and attempts to construct facts rather than create an image of the interviewee. It thus emerges that within the narrative framework of a translating institution, intertextual connections may well deviate from the typical source-text relationship. The following two articles by Rebecca Tipton and Matthew Maltby look at the role of the interpreter in institutional settings and the consequences of the interpreter's interaction with other participants. Tipton, in particular, in her paper ''On Trust: Relationships of Trust in Interpreter-mediated Social Work Encounters'', explores trust as a potential norm of interaction and the impact it has on the relationship between the interpreter, the service provider and the service user in social work encounters. On the basis of focus-group work she carried out, she argues that although there is a general degree of basic trust between professionals, this is often eroded due to changes in social work and practice. This erosion, in turn, leads to compensation strategies which aim at establishing a certain degree of 'normalcy' in order for social workers to be able to carry out their technical work. In the final article in the section ''Institutional Context & Individual Agency'', which is entitled ''Institutional Identities of Interpreters in the Asylum Application Context: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Interpreting Policies in the Voluntary Sector'', Matthew Maltby investigates the ways in which two voluntary sector organizations in the UK asylum context (Asylum Aid and Refugee Action) articulate notions of interpreter impartiality and neutrality in their policies in order to illustrate how institutional requirements might inform interpreting at a more immediate level. Both policies are found to view interpreters as impartial and neutral agents to a greater or lesser degree; yet crucial distinctions are also identified in the ways impartiality and neutrality are conceptualized, since they are partly ideologically shaped by institutional operational objectives. Maltby suggests that, in the interest of interpreter ethics, interpreters could be encouraged to view themselves more actively, as intrinsic elements of an ideologically motivated institutional power structure. The book's final section, entitled ''The Impact of Translation and Interpreting in a Changing World'', includes four articles which center on the globalized world we live in. The first article, by Martha Cheung, is entitled ''Rethinking Activism: The Power of Dynamics of Translation in China during the Late Qing Period (1840-1911)''. As the title suggests, the focus of this historical study is the use and usefulness of translation in serving activist needs and effecting concrete change in the late Qing era in China. Using a model for classifying social movements, developed by the anthropologist David Aberle (1966), Cheung analyzes the aims and aspirations of political activists of different orientations and studies the complex relationship between translation and activism during this particular period. She finds that the larger the readership of a translation, the greater the scope for disseminating activist values and the less predictable the outcome of such a dissemination. She also underlines the importance of carrying out historical research, stressing that it helps us better understand the past and gain lessons for the present and future. Luis Pérez-González also talks about activism in his paper '''Ad-hocracies' of Translation Activism in the Blogosphere: A Genealogical Case Study''. He focuses on subtitling and sets out to explore the ways in which translation tends to become more increasingly appropriated by politically-engaged individuals who have no formal training in translations. He also looks at the role that the networks of such individuals play in the wider process of cultural resistance against global capitalist structures and institutions. More specifically, he analyzes the subtitles of a televised interview with Spain's former Prime Minister José María Aznar López, which were prepared and circulated on the Internet by an activist community, and he argues that such communities emerge through dynamic processes of contextualization, involving complex negotiations of narrative affinity among their members. He also claims that the right term for such networks is 'ad-hocracies', precisely because they are fluid and unstructured and tend to capitalize on the potential of networked communication to exploit collective intelligence. In his article ''Accessing Contextual Assumptions in Dialogue Interpreting: The Case of Illegal Immigrants in the United States'', Robert Barsky evaluates the implications of Mason's work in accessing contextual assumptions in dialogue interpreting. On the basis of a large-scale research project completed in 2009 involving face-to-face interpreting in the cases of illegal immigrants in the United States, he shows that illegal immigrants are often ill-served by the legal system, as they are treated as ''guilty by virtue of being there'' (p. 292). He thus calls for a higher level of engagement on the part of interpreters, for active participation instead of 'objective' mediation, and activism instead of machine-like fidelity. Drawing on Mason's work in ''actual responses'' (2006a: 372), Barsky provides concrete ways of improving approaches to communication, interpretation and translation in such settings. In the section's final contribution, which also concludes the edited volume, Michael Cronin talks about ''The Expanding World: Translation, Mobility and Global Futures''. In particular, he examines the implications for translation of changing experiences of space and time in the contemporary world. He urges us to take as a starting point the incomprehensibility of the other and posits that in translation, we find the creation of some form of shared sense and some degree of commonality as well as a basis for thinking about contemporary multilingual and multicultural societies. EVALUATION The edited volume pays genuine tribute to Ian Mason's scholarship. The influence of his insights is apparent throughout the book, since all contributors -- whether discussing translation or interpreting -- are clearly inspired by his belief that it is impossible to treat any type of mediation as culture-free. Yet, it is worth noting that in some articles, the towering presence of Mason is more prominent. In fact, the articles which focus on dialogue interpreting, an area which has been literally transformed by his pioneering publications, are clearly shaped by his ideas. More specifically, Campbell, Aldahesh, Al-Rubai'i, Chakhachiro and Wakim acknowledge that the roots of their research into textual competence in translation and interpreting go back to Hatim and Mason's (1990) position that translation is linked to aspects of discourse analysis, while in his paper, Barsky looks into the implications of Mason's work in accessing contextual assumptions in dialogue interpreting. Moreover, Maltby takes as a starting point for his research on the institutional identities of interpreters in the context of asylum application Mason's position that ''the interpreter is not a neutral and uninvolved machine but rather an active participant in the talk exchanges, fulfilling a crucial role in coordinating others' talk'' (1999: 50). The entire third section of the book, which is devoted to ''Institutional Context & Individual Agency'', is also strongly influenced by Mason's work, and in particular, his claim that institutional approaches to translation are rather neglected in translation studies. Finally, Mason's ideas also permeate Mossop's contribution, which takes his notion of 'moves' of 'repairing miscommunication' (Mason, 2006b: 116) in interpreting, redefines it as 'conscious mental acts' and applies it to translation. Apart from paying tribute to Ian Mason, the edited volume constitutes a very interesting book which includes a fascinating range of translation and interpreting topics -- as varied as the relation of translation and activism in the late Qing era in China to the ideological significance of the first person plural 'we' in simultaneous interpreting in the European Union. All the articles are built on solid theoretical foundations, while most are based on extensive empirical work. Besides the intrinsic value of each of the chapters, another strong point is that each of them contributes to the advancement of the field of translation studies. In fact, a couple of articles (Koskinen's ''On EU Communication 2.0: Using Social Media to Attain Affective Citizenship'', Pérez-González's '''Ad-hocracies' of Translation Activism in the Blogosphere: A Genealogical Case Study'' and Cronin's ''The Expanding World: Translation, Mobility and Global Futures'') bring to the forefront issues which are really novel and inextricably tied to the globalized and highly-automated world we are living in and provide food-for-thought for the future. All in all, the book is thought-provoking and highly stimulating, and as such, it reaches out to a wide target audience from the fields of translation studies, cultural studies, and discourse analysis. The editors are thus to be congratulated for bringing together such a diverse group of scholars and such a wide range of material where Mason's work is recalled and celebrated. REFERENCES Aberle, David. 1966. The Peyote Religion among the Navaho. Chicago: Aldine Campbell, Stuart and Berta Wakim. 2007. Methodological Questions about Translation Research: A Model to Underpin Research into the mental Processes of Translation. Target 19(1). 1-19. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason. 1990, Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason. 1997, The Translator as Communicator. London and New York: Routledge. Martin, James R. and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Mason, Ian. (ed.). 1999. Dialogue Interpreting. Special Issue of the Translator 5(2). 147-160. Mason, Ian. 2004. Text Parameters in Translation: Transitivity and Institutional Cultures. In Lawrence Mason, Ian. 2006a. On Mutual Accessibility of Contextual Assumptions in Dialogue Interpreting. Journal of Pragmatics 38(3). 359-373. Mason, Ian. 2006b. Ostension, Inference and Response: Analysing Participant Moves in Community Interpreting Dialogues. Linguistica Antverpiensia NS: 5. 103-120. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Vilelmini Sosoni, PhD, is Lecturer in Translation at the Ionian University in Greece. She also works as a freelance translator and subtitler. Her research interests lie in the areas of the translation of EU texts, text hybridity, text linguistics and translation, norms in translation, translation quality, language diversity and multilingualism, language ideologies, translation and political discourse. She has published papers in international journals and in edited volumes. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 26-Sep-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.