DOUBTS AND DIRECTIONS IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

STUDENTS: PITARU MIRELA- GEORGETA CIOROIANU ECATERINA FLOREA ALEXANDRA- LUIZA GANCILA ANDREEA- GEORGIANA
EUROPEAN LEGAL TRANSLATION AND TERMINOLOGY MASTER ENGLISH LANGUAGE FRENCH LANGUAGE FIRST YEAR

Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies (TS) could be a misleading title. It is not a reference book on TS research, or a handbook. It is a selection of the contributions presented at the EST Conference which took place in Lisbon on 29-30 September 2004 under the title Doubts and Directions. The book is divided into 5 Parts (or broad categories) alongside the Table of Contents, Notes, References, Name Index and Subject Index. These 5 parts are: Theory, Methodology, Empirical Research, Linguistics-based and Literature-based. The Introduction presents the origin of the book but also a brief description of what contains every part of the book. Doubts and Directions entails the combination of two aims: firstly, to reflect the diversity of the papers presented in the conference; secondly, to offer the reader a publication where questions, assumptions, biases, approaches and other presuppositions on TS are dealt with in a structured and coherent manner. Doubts and Directions is, therefore, a necessary forum for discussion rather than an in-depth study of overarching questions in TS. The book proposes to be an attempt to reflect the interdisciplinarity of Translation and Interpreting (T/I) and to show areas where TS could shed light on and vice versa (i.e. Semiotics, Transfer Studies, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, and Pragmatics). Like is suggested by the title Theory, Part One deals with theoretical aspects: unique items and translation universals (Chesterman), the scope of Translation Studies, with the possibility of opening up towards Semiotics (Stecconi) and Transfer Studies (Gpferich), and translator's competence (Alves and Gonalves). None of these aspects is new to Translation Theory, and therefore the fear of 'reinventing the wheel is always present in this Part. However, overall, the four articles manage to approach these aspects in an innovative way. Andrew Chesterman in his article What is a unique item? offers a critical analysis of the unique item hypothesis and raises a number of methodological issues concerning research on the topic. He suggests that, by drawing the attention of trainees to items that are typically under- or over-represented in translations, the future translators can be encouraged to use these items more or less frequently than they might otherwise have

done. The keywords of his text are: unique items hypothesis, recurring patterns, comparable non-translated texts, linguistic resources, relative dissimilarity. U. Stecconi and Gpferich deal, in their papers (Five reasons why semiotics is good for Translation Studies, Translation Studies and Transfer Studies ), with concepts such as translation events, equivalence, text transformation and quality assessment. They explain how TS can benefit by opening up towards Semiotics, on the one hand, and Transfer Studies, on the other. Both authors justify the expansion they propose, and take issue with the current scope of TS. There are three existential characters that can be identified for translation semiosis: difference, similarity, and mediation. Together, they can determine to frame a fundamental question: What do we talk about when we talk about translation? Fulfilling the role of Theory in Research, more questions than solutions are put forward. Moreover, as Alves and Gonalves show on their article on Modelling translators competence, any theoretical questioning has methodological implications. In this particular article, they address problem-solving and decision-making, two central aspects of translators' everyday practice, from a Relevance Theory and connectionist point of view. The four texts consider Translation as a rather cognitive action where the process might be the focus of theoretical study. A critical and more comprehensive view on Translation and Interpreting could take into account the activity and its actors in a broader and complex social and cultural (or intercultural) system. In Part Two, Methodology, the central question addressed in the four texts is how to improve the tools of research. The focus is now the background, the tools and the approaches which are in use in order to come up with a coherent and solid outcome. In the article Notes for a cartography of literary translation history in Portugal, Seruya et al. and Grant and Mezei show how translation has evolved in different ways according to particular cultural contexts (Portugal and Canada, respectively), with clear methodological implications for each study. Whereas Seruya et al. consider that 'excavation sites' must be opened to tackle the development of the research (an outline of literary translation history in Portugal),

Grant and Mezei acknowledge, in their paper Establishing an online bibliographic database for Canadian Literary Translation Studies, a long-established and recognized literary translation history determined by the socio-cultural context, which, in turn, has also deep roots in research and institutions (political and academic). The scope of this study (aimed at establishing an online bibliographic database of Canadian literary translation studies) is, therefore, much more empirical and descriptive. Reading these two articles with a comparative point of view will provide the reader with an interesting insight into how methodology could shape and determine the findings of a particular study on Translation and Interpreting. The remaining two articles are dealing generally, with the role of technology in translation management and methods of simultaneous interpreting. One of these papers, The role of technology in translation management, is written by Risku, who believes that the best tools that can be used in translation are: efficiency, creativity and quality, which have been keywords for translators for a long time. This paper looks at the role played by technology in the creation of expert texts for international audiences. It takes into consideration direct and indirect users of translation technologies, the opportunities that these technologies may offer, their limitations and, even the dangers that can appear from their misuse. The study describes the available tools and technologies and the current requirements for translation management, proposing a concept for the future of translation studies teaching and research. The other one, Establishing rigour in a between-methods investigation of SI expertise, published by Hild, suggests the use of four methods of investigation to explore simultaneous interpreting: triangulation, assessing task representativeness, sampling and data management. Each of these four underlines the importance of a precise and systematic definition of the object of study, adequacy of procedures to be used, contextualization of the results, and relevant consequences of the research. Methodological triangulation as a strategy for establishing completeness and gaining a deeper understanding of the complexity of SI expertise was critically examined in the context of an investigation of SI discourse processing.

Both articles lay the ground for the following Part, as they show that methodology and the object/subject of study are extremely linked. Part Three, named Empirical Research, has seven texts, which are dealing, as suggested by the title, with empirical research. A study of the performance of ten professional translators revising a legal text, presents some results of a study on translation revision. Ten professional translators were asked to think aloud while revising three texts that had been translated from French into German. The focus of the analysis was on investigating the changes the revisers made in the draft translations, or their failures to make changes; and on their task definition on the other hand. The article presents only the results from the revision of a legal text. The article Translational analysis and the dynamics of reading suggests that close reading of translations and their source texts can enhance university students awareness of literary reading as a dynamic process. The experiment takes place in a Swedish university, but the basic ideas are relevant for any university. The argument is illustrated by an example from H. B. Paulls English translation of Hans Christian Andersens tale The Steadfast Tin-Soldier. The effect of translation on humour response The case of dubbed comedy in Italy This article is about an investigation made to explore the reaction of Italians to Verbally Expressed Humour (VEH) when it is translated for the screen and how far translation might have an impact on individual Humour Responses (HR). 22 British informants watched seven video-clips containing examples of VEH in their original language (English) and recorded their HR to each clip. Similarly, 34 Italians recorded their HR to the same clips in their dubbed and/or subtitled Italian versions. A test revealed that the Italians HR was slightly lower than that of the British respondents thus implying that translational impact on HR was minimal. SAT, BLT, Spirit Biscuits, and the Third Amendment What Italians make of cultural references in dubbed texts On average, Italian television viewers are exposed to more than 350 hours of dubbed programmes per week. They contain a wide array of references to all the specific aspects and features of the source languages and cultures. In order to find out if Italians

perceive the countless culture bumps contained in translated audiovisual, the researchers carried out a large-scale study which investigated Italian audiences perception of dubbing. The article Reception, text and context in the study of opera surtitles, aims at explaining what means opera surtitles in Translation Studies. The author Martha Mateo, from the University of Oviedo, Spain, makes a description of the differences which appear between strategies adopted by certain opera houses. She also discusses the alternative ways of implementing operational norms and negotiating the constraints imposed by the transmission channel and by reception factors. She reviews the different factors that intervene in surtitling products: the textual nature of the source text, contextual and reception factors, translation policies and norms and also technical constraints. The article What makes interpreters notes efficient?-Features of (non-)efficiency in interpreters notes for consecutive- focuses on identifying the features of efficiency and non-efficiency in interpreters notes for consecutive. The author, Helle V. Dam based her hypotheses on the target texts and on notes produced by five interpreters working from Spanish into Danish. Thus, she found three correlations on the base of which she formulated her three hypotheses: 1. the more the notes, the better the target text and vice versa 2. the more the abbreviations/the fewer the full words, the better the target text and vice versa 3. the more the notes in the source language/the fewer in the target language, the better the target text and vice versa. Therefore the firs hypothesis refers to the notes quality, the second one to the note form and the third to the note language. Next paper Traduction, Genre et discours scientifique, is the last paper in this part three. Its author, Dolors Sanchez, focused on the role played by scientific discourses and their translation in the transmission of dominant gendered representations. In order to put in evidence this role, he used as example a translation from French to Spanish. He underlines the fact that the translation is a historical, cultural and social product that must take into account the differences between men and women. In this respect, the aim of this article was to illustrate the pertinence of the gender perspective. He also makes an interesting comparison between literary discourse and scientific one, putting them in opposition.

With the next article, it starts the part four Linguistics- based - of this book. This first article named Evaluative noun phrases in journalism and their translation from English into Finnish, deals with ideology through the frequency, functions and effects of the evaluative premodified noun phrases in English and Finnish newspapers. The author, Tiina Puurtinen, compares the use of evaluative premodified noun phrases in English and Finnish newspaper and magazine texts (articles, editorials, columns) and discusses the relevance of potential differences to translation. The conclusion that can be drawn from this comparative article is that Finnish news articles use evaluative premodified NPs less frequently than English articles. The paper Translating the implicit - On the inferencing and transfer of semantic relations is an examination of the way that the translators translate a text characterised by a high level of implicit semantic relations between sentences. The study implied Six MA translation students and five experienced translators which translated a text from Spanish to Danish. In this respect, the participants were formed two groups. The next paper, Divisions, description and applications - The interface between DTS, corpus-based research and contrastive analysis, written by Rosa Rabadan, deals with the interface between Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), corpus-based research and contrastive analysis illustrated in the modality- necessity field, from English into Spanish. The aim of this paper is to show how to draw on the interdependencies among the three areas contrastive analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based studies to obtain application-oriented data. The article Construals in literary translation - Spatial particles and spatial imagery deals with the perspective of spatial relations (spatial particles and spatial imagery) in translation. The author, Hanne Jansen, makes an interesting comparative study between Italian and Danish focusing on the means of expression of spatial relations in translated texts. Therefore, the author provides examples from Italian and Danish original texts and their translations and analyzes the structural and normative peculiarities of each linguistic system and differences between them within the area of spatial particles and spatial imagery.

The article The relevance of utterer-centered linguistics to Translation Studies insists on the importance of linguistics in the complex and multidimensional field of translation. The authors, Simos Grammenidis & Tonia Nenopoulou, aim at making obvious the significant role of linguistics-oriented approaches in translation. In this respect, the authors focus on the contributions of utterer-centered approach to developing translators ability to access meaning and to creating an objective and antidogmatic view of translation. Part Five Literature based is divided into four articles dealing with translation issues observed in literary works. The first article De la question de la lisibilit des traductions franaises de Don Quijote deals with the concept of readability in the case of translating classics focusing on the translations of Don Quixote, in particular the 20th-century French translations of Cervantess masterpiece. According to the author, Marc Charron, the concept of readability is closely related to the notions of comprehensibility and accessibility of a translated text and in most cases represents the reason why some argue the need of a new translation version of an ancient original text a translated version of an original text gradually becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced by another translation written in the present-day language. The author distinguishes between archaizing translation and modernizing translation; the former tends to the other language (the language of the original) and the latter tends to the readers own language (the contemporary readers language). For a better understanding of readability the author proposes a three-stage analysis model based on the French translations of Don Quixote, in particular the translation version made by Allaigre, Canavaggio and Moner published in 2001. The second article of part V Collusion or authenticity Problems in translated dialogues in modern womens travel writing presents travel writing as the focus of one aspect of Translation Studies. The author, Maureen Mulligan, analyzing the writings of three women travel writers, highlights the idea that travel writing, i.e. the process of rewriting of other cultures, is viewed as a form of translation. On the basis of this concept, the traveler who goes to another culture and writes about is presented as a performer of a translating act due to the fact that enables the reader in the target culture

to have access to a source culture. Next, the author provides numerous examples of different techniques (dialogue given as direct or summarized speech, quotations from local people) which transforms the process of writing into a process of translation and which also aims at establishing the authenticity of the text. The third article - Translators agency in 19th-century Finland deals with the translators role and agency in translation in the 19th century Finland. The author, Outi Paloposki, focuses on the choices, decisions and arguments of one individual translator, K. G. S. Suomalainen, and tries to reveal, by studying his correspondence, comments from his publishers, newspaper criticism, notes, drafts and letters from readers, the role of the translator and the norms and constraints of the surrounding society to which the translator of the 19th century had to adapt. Therefore, the author introduces the concept of translators agency which can be rendered in many ways (his/her textual and deliberate or not stylistic presence in translations, in book selection or the adoption of certain strategies, and in the translators impact on the literary or linguistic scene) and which is closely related to other concepts such as translators credibility, norms and constraints of the society. The last article of part five Le concept de mimesis is based on translation as practiced and thought of by Antoine Artaud, French author. The author of this section, Annick Mannekens, studies Artauds poetry and defines his activity of grafting some of his texts on the texts of other authors as a process of rewriting. Annik Mannekens includes the notion of rewriting in the vast framework of mimesis. Next, she brings arguments that Artaud illustrates in an excellent way the pattern author translator and his rewriting is not actually an imitation of the original text, but a productive kind of mimesis which creates a whole new, original text. To conclude, the book is user-friendly, written in a clear style; it addresses to all students interested in translation studies and especially to all who want to find out what is new in this field. The book is bringing new insights into translation universals; suggesting directions and trying to clarify some doubts in the field, the book addresses to all students interested in translation studies and especially to all who want to understand more about translation in general and the nature of translating.