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Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:39:51 +0100 From: Sara Laviosa <saralaviosa@tiscali.it> Subject: Translation: An Advanced Resource Book
AUTHORS: Hatim, Basil; Munday, Jeremy TITLE: Translation SUBTITLE: An Advanced Resource Book SERIES: Routledge Applied Linguistics PUBLISHER: Routledge YEAR: 2004
Sara Laviosa, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
Addressed to students of Masters Degrees and final year undergraduates in translation or applied linguistics as well as research students and professional translators, this book investigates the practice and theory of translation, i.e. the object of study of an interdisciplinary field of knowledge known as Translation Studies, which has grown significantly in the past 20 years owing, among other factors, to the rapid expansion of translation activities in the present globalized world.
The volume comprises three sections. A: Introduction, B: Extension, C: Exploration. Each section is divided into 14 units, each dealing with the same key area of Translation Studies, approached from a variety of linguistic and cultural angles and with increasing levels of complexity as we progress from Section A to Section C. The units are presented in the following order: Unit 1: What is translation?, Unit 2: Translation strategies, Unit 3: The unit of translation, Unit 4: Translation shifts, Unit 5: The analysis of meaning, Unit 6: Dynamic equivalence and the receptor of the message, Unit 7: Textual pragmatics and equivalence, Unit 8: Translation and relevance, Unit 9: Text type in translation, Unit 10: Text register in translation, Unit 11: Text, genre and discourse shifts in translation, Unit 12: Agents of power in translation, Unit 13: Ideology and translation, Unit 14: Translation and the information technology era. The volume also contains a glossary of key terms in Translation Studies, an extensive bibliography and a further reading list for each unit.
The Introduction (Section A) presents the main terms and concepts of Translation Studies using examples drawn on a wide range of languages and engaging the reader with a series of tasks aimed at reflecting on the principles informing a particular area of translation and at relating theory to practical experience. At each stage in the theoretical exposition a useful concept box summarizes the main points.
The Extension (Seciton B) presents at least one influential reading excerpted from the works of leading scholars in the discipline, including James S. Holmes, George Steiner, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Eugene Nida, Werner Koller, and Ernst-Angust Gutt. Each reading is preceded by a brief introduction and a series of tasks that encourage the reader to link the content of the excerpted article or book to the terms and notions introduced in Section A. Each reading is then followed by another set of tasks which invite students to reflect on the issues addressed by bringing their own experience to bear on the theory. These after reading tasks can be easily developed by the teacher into essay-type questions for the whole class or into topics for oral presentations by individual students.
The Exploration (Section C) critically evaluates the areas of study tackled in the previous sections through a series of tasks, each being preceded by a brief introduction. The concluding part summarizes the main points dealt with in each section and suggests one or more projects. These activities are considerably more demanding than the reflection tasks since they require students to engage with full-scale research assignments involving, for example, the collection and analysis of new material over a stated period of time, interviews with professional translators, or the production of translations.
The book can be studied either linearly, i.e. progressing from the whole of Section A to the whole of Section B and Section C, or thematically, tackling one unit at a time and following it right through from Section A up to Section C. So, for example, if one wished to concentrate on translation strategies, the topic covered in Unit 2, one would first of all learn, in Section A, about the classical dichotomy in translation between sense/content and form/style, the difference between literal and free translation, and the broad notions of translatability and comprehensibility. In Section B, one would then read about and reflect on the concept of translatability as discussed in by George Steiner in an extract from his book After Babel that first appeared in 1975. Finally, in Section C, the reader would critically appraise all the above notions through the analysis of real life translations and book reviews. S/he would also be introduced to another pair of opposing strategies, namely Lawrence Venuti's domestication and foreignization, which would be subsequently investigated by carrying out projects involving the study of published translations, the production of a domesticating and a foreignizing translation of the same source text, and the study of published reviews of translated works.
Together with Basil Hatim's Teaching and Researching Translation (2001), Jeremy Munday's Introducing Translation Studies (2001), and Lawrence Venuti's The Translation Studies Reader (2000), the present volume is essential reading in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Translation Studies. Finally, to complement and enrich this truly innovative advanced resource book, there is a very useful website where students can browse in search of further text samples, translations, and updated information on developments and events pertaining to the discipline of Translation Studies.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sara Laviosa was Head of the Italian Section of the School of Languages at
the University of Salford, UK, where she lectured in translation practice and
theory. She is now a Research Fellow in English Language and Translation
at the Dipartimento degli Studi Anglo-Germanici e dell'Europa Orientale
(S.A.G.E.O), University of Bari, Italy. Her main research interests are in
Corpus-based Translation Studies. She has designed the English
Comparable Corpus (ECC) and the Commercial Italian Corpus (COMIC) and
has contributed to the development of the Translational English Corpus
(TEC). She has published articles and collected volumes on Translation
Studies and Language Teaching Methodologies. She has authored the
volume Corpus-based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications
and co-authored a textbook for undergraduates Learning by Translating: A
Course in Translation: English to Italian & Italian to English.
