Mona Baker (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies. London/New York: Routledge 1998.

In recent years scholarly attention has been lavished upon translation studies, and the publication by Routledge of an encyclopaedia surveying the field marks its establishment as a fully-fledged academic discipline. As befits a reference work on such a truly multicultural science, it is based on the cumulative effort of around 90 translation specialists from countries as diverse as Japan, Germany, Iceland, Hongkong and Brazil. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a certain numerical bias in favour of English and American scholars. The intended target audience comprises students and teachers of translation, interpreting and literary theory.

The encyclopaedia is divided into two parts. Part I contains alphabetically-arranged entries on a wide variety of general issues in translation studies. Part II provides overviews of the history and tradition of translation in most of the major language communities.

In a scene-setting introduction Mona Baker states that, due to the ever-increasing rapidity of change in academia, an encyclopaedia will almost inevitably be out of date at the time of publication. Rather than strive for a fully comprehensive account she therefore sets herself the more modest, and more realistic, aim of presenting a ‘balanced, non-partisan’ picture of the science of translation. This has led to the fully justified decision to base the book on a broadly-conceived notion of the field, including articles on such themes as court interpreting, publishing strategies and gender metaphorics in translation. Baker then proceeds to summarize some valuable insights offered by the historical section of the book, discussing such recent avenues of research as the social role and status of translators and their working contexts. One particularly interesting point she makes is that even the broadest definition of translation cannot yet deal adequately with such phenomena as the translation of drum language into actual words. To sum up, the introduction gives the reader an agreeable foretaste of the body of the book, to which we now turn.

When reviewing a collaborative work such as this, it is no light task to do justice to all the contributors. I have read a large selection of articles, but if I were to comment on every single one I would clearly exceed my word limit. I will therefore begin by making some general comments, and then go on to undertake a more detailed appreciation of a small number of articles.

First, generalities. The book is handsomely and sturdily bound, and is not so heavy or cumbersome as to make armchair reading impossible. It is also uniformly presented and well-crafted, with a remarkably small number of misprints. Despite the large number of contributors, many of whom do not have a native-like command of English, Mona Baker has succeeded in evening out stylistic differences between authors, making the text eminently readable and readily accessible even to first-year students of translation. Only very few linguistic errors and infelicities remain; these should be remedied in future editions, as an encyclopeadia of the language profession can hardly afford to project a negative image in this area. A few examples chosen at random will suffice. Hans-Jörg Vermeer’s article on translation didactics contains a number of Germanisms (e.g. ‘circumstances of commission’, ‘after a certain time lag’), and could do with some editorial brushing-up. The following pieces of text, gleaned from other articles, exemplify similar infelicities: ‘The quest for Europeanization provided the initiative for a nature [sic!] of outstanding translations of Francophone, German and English poetry by the poet Geo Milev’ (353); ‘as is the case of’ (512) which should be ‘as in the case of’ or ‘as is the case with’. Bakker, Koster and Van-Leuwen Zwart use the term ‘predicate’ (229) to designate the verb phrase in its functional capacity as part of a sentence. The correct English word is ‘predicator’ or simply ‘verb’.

But these are minor points. More seriously, some of the works cited or suggested for further reading are not mentioned in the bibliography (e.g. Yebra 1992 [p. 49]).

Another clear strength of the encyclopaedia lies in the relatively homogeneous academic quality of its contents. Most of the contributors exhibit a broad knowledge of their specialist subjects, synthesizing the available literature into a representative whole. In this regard articles such as Dorothy Kenny’s (Corpora and Translation Studies) deserve special mention. Kenny provides the novice in corpus-based translation studies with a broad-ranging, up-to-date survey, citing intriguing research findings and pointing out fascinating avenues for future work, such as the corpus-driven study of translationese. She omits to mention such recent overviews of corpus studies as Habert/Nazarenko/Salem (1997) and Kennedy (1998), probably because they had not yet appeared at the time the book under review went to press.

Some of the more blatant omissions may be put down to two kinds of factors. A first problem is that some authors, in spite of the claims to balance made by the editor, present a one-sided view of their subjects. Hans-Jörg Vermeer’s contribution on the Didactics of Translation is a case in point. Vermeer presents a somewhat parochial survey based exclusively on Skopos theory.

Secondly, British and American translation scholars are often at home in only one foreign language, so that they tend to be unfamiliar with at least part of the Russian, German and French literature on the subject, not to mention Japanese and Chinese contributions. This is true, for instance, of Roger Bell (Psycholinguistic/Cognitive Approaches), an unhappy choice of author for a subject in which German authors writing in German laid the foundations (e.g. Krings 1986; Lörscher is alone in writing in English). Similarly, Guy Cook (Use of Translation in Language Teaching), while presenting a rounded picture of the use of translation in language teaching, overlooks Butzkamm’s (1973) and König’s (1987) work.

A similar problem arises with respect to Michael Hoey’s and Diane Houghton’s contribution on Contrastive Analysis and Translation. Hoey and Houghton overlook the fact that before parallel concordancing became possible, numerous contrastivists, notably Vinay/Darbelnet, Grünbeck, Friederich, Ballard, Truffaut, Blumenthal and Gallagher had ‘manually’ identified differences between languages, offering useful insights into the nature of each language and providing invaluable guidance for translation practitioners which an encyclopaedia of translation studies ought to mention. It is also untrue that ‘translation as a source of data for CA is strictly unavoidable’ (49); plainly, the use of parallel texts - here meaning texts belonging to the same text type or dealing with the same subject - will also do the trick. It also helps solve the problems associated with semantic or pragmatic tertia comparationis mentioned by Hoey and Houghton. Gallagher (1992), for example, undertakes a contrastive analysis of such multi-word discourse devices as German ‘erschwerend kommt hinzu, daß’, English ‘to complicate matters further’ and French ‘il y a plus grave’. Basing his analysis on parallel texts in the aforementioned sense, Gallagher concludes that there are one-to-many equivalences between the languages under review and that the choice of the right equivalent is dependent on a large number of factors. Another interesting study is Göpferich (1991), who uses the example of patent specifications to show how the findings of such cross-language analysis of parallel texts can profitably be brought together in a ‘textographical’ translation database.

A second edition of the book could profit from the inclusion of a number of additional entries on subjects germane to translation and the teaching of translation. Examples include translation and information structure (cf. Doherty 1992 and 1996), textbooks of translation (cf. Siepmann 1996), parallel texts (in the aforementioned sense), comparative stylistics and contrastive text linguistics.

Despite these strictures, the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies is an outstanding collection of the latest scholarship which should find its way into every library and onto every translatologist’s shelf.

References

Butzkamm, W. (1973), Aufgeklärte Einsprachigkeit. Zur Entdogmatisierung der Methode im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Heidelberg.

Doherty, M. (1992), ‘Informationelle Holzwege: Ein Problem der Übersetzungswissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 84: 30-49.

Doherty, M. (1996), ‘Passive perspectives; different preferences in English and German: a result of parameterized processing’, Linguistics 34, 591-643.

Gallagher, J. D. (1992), ‘Erschwerend kommt hinzu, daß ... Zur Übersetzung eines mikrosyntaktischen Gliederungssignals’, Lebende Sprachen 3: 100-103.

Göpferich, S. (1991), ‘Von der Terminographie zur Textographie: Computergestützte Verwaltung textsortenspezifischer Versatzstücke’, Special Language/Fachsprache 1-2: 17-41.

Habert, B./Nazarenko, A./Salem, A. (1997), Les linguistiques de corpus. Paris.

Kennedy, G. (1998), An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London/New York.

Krings, H.P. (1986), Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht. Eine empirische Untersuchung an fortgeschrittenen Französischlernern. Tübingen.

Königs, F.G. (1987), ‘Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Übersetzung und Spracherwerb’. In: A. Addison/K. Vogel (eds.), Lehren und Lernen von Fremdsprachen im Studium. Bochum, 39-70.

Siepmann, D. (1996), Übersetzungslehrbücher: Perspektiven für ihre Entwicklung. Bochum.

Dirk Siepmann