16.756, Review: Translation: Hatim & Munday (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-756. Sat Mar 12 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.756, Review: Translation: Hatim & Munday (2004)

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1)
Date: 11-Mar-2005
From: Sara Laviosa < saralaviosa at tiscali.it >
Subject: Translation: An Advanced Resource Book 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 13:59:25
From: Sara Laviosa < saralaviosa at 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
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2787.html


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

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.





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