16.954, Review: Translation: Cronin (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-954. Tue Mar 29 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.954, Review: Translation: Cronin (2003)

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1)
Date: 28-Mar-2005
From: Ingrid Mosquera Gende < ingrid at udc.es >
Subject: Translation and Globalization 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:21:14
From: Ingrid Mosquera Gende < ingrid at udc.es >
Subject: Translation and Globalization 
 

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AUTHOR: Cronin, Michael
TITLE: Translation and Globalization
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1186.html


Dr. Ingrid Mosquera Gende, Department of English Philology, University of 
A Coruña, Spain

INTRODUCTION

Michael Cronin, Dean of the Joint Faculty of Humanities and Director of 
the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University, 
is the author of this book, which is addressed both to people devoted to 
professional translation, as well as to a general audience who will find 
answers to many questions related to the importance of translation and its 
relation to contemporary global societies and economies.

SYNOPSIS

The book includes an introductory section of Acknowledgements in which one 
can already notice the diversity of sources consulted in order to carry 
out the research and study revealed in the book, in terms of 
multiculturalism - a very relevant aspect to take into consideration due 
to the central position of the issue of globalization in the text. 

After this, there is a brief introduction, three pages long, subtitled 
Echolands: Translation Now. In this section the author poses major 
questions about translation, opening a great range of possibilities that 
he develops in the subsequent chapters. Cronin underlines that he will 
mainly deal with non-literary translation, since it has always been given 
less importance, from his point of view, and he does not agree with this, 
much less in the global world of today. This introduction ends with a 
description of the issues tackled in each of the chapters, explaining the 
reasons for their importance. The whole section is enriched with different 
references to books and authors that are used to exemplify his approaches. 

The body of the volume comprises five chapters: 1. Translation and the 
Global Economy; 2. Globalization and New Translation Paradigms; 3. 
Globalization and the New Geography of Translation; 4. Globalization and 
the New Politics of Translation; 5. Translation and Minority Languages in 
a Global Setting. Each of these chapters is divided into subsections of 
about one page long, which makes it easy to read and follow the text. At 
the same time, these subsections' titles are very explicit in content and 
ideas, so that with just one quick look it is possible to get an idea of 
the themes dealt within each of them. 

Then, there follow a couple of pages dedicated to notes on the chapters. 
There are not too many, a perfect complement that does not involve 
fundamental content but provides an exemplification of some of the points 
treated.

At the end of the book there is a relatively extensive bibliography, 
useful for further reading about the relationship between globalization, 
translation and new technologies, including many titles published 
recently. Although it could be taken for granted, it is also important to 
underline the presence of a thorough Index by which one can easily find 
references to authors as well as to relevant themes dealt within the book.

Chapter 1 and 2
These first chapters share common points. For instance, most of their 
subsections start with questions that stimulate curiosity in the reader. 
In both chapters, as in the rest, we find many citations from other 
authors; in the first one there is one author that is worth mentioning due 
to his continuing presence, Manuel Castells, and in the second one it is 
Wattenberg.

Apart from that, the five chapters share the same way of starting by 
introducing historical anecdotes, related, in one sense or the other, to 
the themes that the writer is later to develop.

Regarding those two first chapters, it is very important to underline how 
some relationships are being establish and explained: "the relationship 
between translation and things" (9), "the relationship between translation 
and the technosphere" (10), "the self and the net" (12), "the relationship 
between techne and cultural development" (28), "the relationship between 
translators and tools" (29), "the relationship between translation and the 
nation-state" (56), "the relationship between translation and diversity" 
(73).  

These two chapters are also used in order to define terms that we are 
going to find in the rest of the book. The author introduces specific and 
complex terms in a gradual way, so one understands them, gets familiar 
with them and then, without noticing, one is already using them as part of 
his/her own vocabulary. In this sense the book is very enriching. Many of 
those words are presented as dichotomy pairs, although not always. Some 
examples of relevant terms introduced in these chapters are the following, 
apart from the ones included in the relationships mentioned above: 
informational society / information society, global economy, 
internationalization / localization / elocalization, cognitive content / 
aesthetic content, translation as communication / translation as 
transmission, message as the medium, tools / material support / products, 
globalization / anti-globalization, networks and networking, gatekeeper / 
switch, database, economics of attachment, market utopianism, 
Americanization, development state, politics of translation, agency, neo-
Babelianism, localization / translation, translators as mediators, 
transmission, fidelity, time, mnemonic time in translation / instantaneous 
time, intralingual / interlingual.

Despite the common points in their structure, Chapter 1 deals with modern 
society and economy, characterising the last as informational and global, 
and explaining the importance of technology in relation to translation 
studies and its tools. Chapter 2 focuses on the network and its 
consequences on translation and society, with examples from all around the 
world, from the United States of America to Asia, passing via Europe. 
Special attention is given to the term neo-Babelianism and its 
implications, and to the role of translators nowadays, for instance taking 
into account different types of time (see above).

Chapter 3
This chapter presents Ireland as an example of one of the most important 
centres of translation, as well as a country with a minority language. 
Taking that into account, the author also comments on the notion of 
censorship and its different forms. Although this chapter is far more 
descriptive than the other two, it also contains some new terms and 
relationships, such as the one between localization and hegemony, and the 
words polyglossia / heteroglossia, censorship of experience, 
anthropoemic / anthropophagic and global city. 

Chapter 4
This chapter delves more deeply into the status of the translator in the 
technological era, with a special remark on economical implications in the 
translator's work, dealing, among many other items, with deadlines and 
time. 

It also describes the different types of machine-aid translation; Michael 
Cronin gives a detailed classification of them, from cyborgs to automated 
translation, explaining the relevance of computer-assisted translation 
(CAT), machine translation (MT) or synchronous, automated translation 
systems (SATS).

Literary translation also has a place in this chapter in order to explain 
its situation nowadays in respect to economy, market and other types of 
translations.

If the importance of time was introduced in other sections of the book 
before, in this chapter there is a special treatment of the subject, which 
is called "Chronopolitics"; this theme is explained and developed at this 
point, introducing essential terms such as incompleteness, metonym or 
supra-national institutions.

Chapter 5
Here, Michael Cronin takes a closer look to the situation of minority 
languages and the influences that translation can have on their situation, 
for instance by means of "translation ecology". He claims that "minority 
is the expression of a relation, not an essence" (144). From this point 
onwards the author establishes and studies several dichotomy pairs, as we 
have already seen in other chapters; in this case: diachronic / spatial 
relation, target-language intensive / source-language intensive, pragmatic 
functions / aesthetic functions, intralingual translation differentials / 
interlingual translation differentials.

The last pages of the chapter are devoted to several classifications 
related to translation. On the one hand, some points are enumerated as a 
kind of conclusion about their relevance in relation with translation: 
training, research, heteroglossia and retreat for language. On the other 
hand, travel writing in minority languages is explained in three different 
levels (minoritization of language within travel, minoritization of 
minority-language travel accounts and minoritization of travel writing on 
the minority language) and by means of several strategies (mimesis, 
defamiliarization, periphrasis, exclusion and translation).

EVALUATION

Some minor criticism and personal opinions were made in the summaries of 
the chapters. On the whole, the book is a great, original, necessary and 
quite novel approach to translation studies from an economic, social, 
global and linguistic point of view. One possible drawback could be the 
complexity and density of explanations and terms but, since these are very 
well introduced, explained and widely repeated, at the end one finds 
oneself having accumulated a large amount of specific vocabulary. In this 
sense, chapters 1 and 2 are very well structured while the last three are 
rather more confusing. In these there lies a greater degree of complexity, 
deriving from the fact that explanations depend on one another, so if 
something is not sufficiently clear, it is difficult to understand the 
following item. However, one just needs a little more concentration to 
follow the complex and intelligent connections - subsection divisions of 
the chapters help to achieve this aim.

Michael Cronin effectively describes, explains and defends his proposals 
about the situation of translation nowadays. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ingrid Mosquera Gende teaches at the University of A Coruña, Spain. Her 
Ph.D. is in English Philology; her Doctoral Thesis is about Edwin 
Muir: "Early Poetry of a Late Poet: Analysis of First Poems". She has had 
several research stays in Scotland, supervised by specialists such as 
Professor Cairns Craig and Robert Crawford. She is a researcher of 
projects related to Translation Studies, Literature and Education. She has 
many publications and contributions about Translation, Scottish 
Literature, as well as other fields of study, including Education, Irish 
Literature, and Spanish Literature. She teaches courses via the internet 
in collaboration with The University of Islas Baleares, Spain, and is a 
reviewer and translator for various universities.





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