Book Reviews

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Book Reviews Robert E. Hegel; Christiane Nord; Andrzej Pawelec

Online Publication Date: 01 November 2007

To cite this Article Hegel, Robert E., Nord, Christiane and Pawelec, Andrzej(2007)'Book Reviews',Perspectives,15:4,278 — 285 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13670050802278140 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050802278140

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Book Reviews

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Translation, Globalisation and Localisation: A Chinese Perspective Wang Ning and Sun Yifeng (eds). Clevedon, UK, Buffalo, NY, and Toronto, ON: Multilingual Matters, 2008. (Topics in Translation 35.) Pp 220. ISBN 978-184769-053-1 (hbk): US$99.95. Translation studies as a discipline is well established in Europe, but it is still new in North America and in Asia. Some would still dispute its parameters, but as its proponents define the field, it necessarily includes theoretical and analytical studies as well as the practice of translation. All of these areas are developed in Europe, but the USA lags behind in analyses of translations and China in theoretical formulations of the problems of translation. All areas of the world move quickly forward with the production of translations, of course; the increased pace of globalisation necessitates nothing less. Ever since the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies of the 1990s, it has been a commonplace that choices made in the process of translation are shaped by the cultural context of the translator as well as political pressures she might not be fully aware of. So, too, is the field of translation studies. The present collection responds to a need to interject Chinese perspectives into the larger discussions of translation studies theory, most of which go on in English. Despite the signal contribution already made by this journal and other such collections, the essays here make a splendid addition to the field, based on rich experience, careful theoretical formulation, and incisive analyses of selected texts. The volume deserves widespread circulation and careful attention by anyone who is seriously engaged in translation or translation studies; it marks a new milestone in this rapidly expanding field. As one might expect, despite its subtitle this volume presents far more than one Chinese perspective. Like China’s translators and readers, its contributors come from diverse backgrounds and share little more than deep knowledge of their field and a sincere desire to contribute to its development. The distinguished contributors here are based in various parts of China (Chen Yongguo, Wang Ning, and Xu Yanhong in Beijing, Mu Lei and Wang Dongfeng in Guangzhou), in Hong Kong (Eugene Chen Eoyang and Sun Yifeng) and in Macao (Mao Sihui); others write from Europe (Cay Dollerup, Copenhagen), the United States (Edwin Gentzler, Amherst, Mass.), and Canada (Xie Ming, Toronto). Their levels and types of engagement in China differ: even so, all are remarkable for the information they present as well for as their insights. After an introduction by Wang Ning and Sun Yifeng, its 10 essays are divided between ‘historical overviews’ and ‘current developments’. But these divisions should not prompt readers to focus on only one area: Introduction and essays in both sections all thoughtfully address both the brief history of self-conscious theorising of translations in China and recent accomplishments in this area. The divisions are more a convenience than substantive; reading

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the essays against each other reveal significant accomplishments as well as ongoing problems of the field. In the Introduction, the editors argue for the uniqueness of China’s contributions to translation studies; appropriately, the process of globalisation has hardly homogenised scholarly insights any more than it has enforced one type of translation across international borders. Instead of some vague ‘Westernization’ of translation theory in China, what they present might be called globalisation with Chinese characteristics, the localisation of trends that circle the globe but that represent the strengths and theoretical sophistication of China’s translators and critics. Significantly, many Chinese translators tend to leave foreign texts ‘foreignized’ in translation, rather than domesticating them to sound fully ‘natural’ (in the very useful distinction presented by Lawrence Venuti; see pp. 63 and153
154). In his essay, Xie Ming goes farther to point out that all representations of the global situation are discursively constructed; the process of modernisation in China has undergone several quite different stages of interpretation. Yet at each stage, China’s translators have generally selected what they felt was most useful for their readers at that time, whether as inspiration for creating new political structures, a new social order, or cultural development. Maintaining foreignness in their translations is one way for Chinese translators to resist Western cultural dominance
it localises modernity without simply accepting that dominance, and it encourages comparative critical studies of culture and its values. He concludes, ‘The act of translation is thus an act of self-reflection’ (p. 30). Cay Dollerup engages the difficult question of cultural ‘incompatibility’ in selecting texts for translation; cultural mediation may be needed to make one text comprehensible or acceptable in another culture. Sun Yifeng and Mu Lei address another challenge: the avoidance or even resistance to translation theory in China (although that phenomenon is certainly not unique to China); the reasons may range from the ‘impracticality’ of theory compared to the pressing need for more texts in translation through its lack of empirical basis to the concern that such theories might be a wholly Western imposition. And for those who work in this area, Sun and Mu suggest that finding ‘uniquely’ Chinese theory may be misguided, despite the differences to date in theoretical approaches compared to Western theorists (p. 57). They endorse the trend to focus on the role of the translator, and on comparative literary approaches in the study of translations. Wang Ning carries forward this approach to identify translation as an ‘inseparable’ element in China’s literary and cultural modernisation. Wang’s view of translation is nuanced; his focus is on the conversation between author, translator, and reader inherent in the process. Since literary texts are indeterminate by definition, there can be no simple way to reproduce the meaning of one text in another. Likewise, Wang Ning convincingly points out the plurality of Chinese literatures: Chinese national culture is not unitary (and, as a literary historian, I would add that it never was). Thus, the ‘glocalization’ process (to use Roland Robertson’s term, see p. 171) of adapting foreign texts into Chinese versions produces hybrids that amalgamate Chinese

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with Western literature and culture
which process also preserves and continues cultural diversity. Xu Yanhong explores the differing approaches to translation in the 1930s by contrasting Lu Xun’s more literal translations with the more domesticated versions advocated by Zhao Jingshen and others. Despite resistance from more cautious cultural figures, she endorses translation as cross-cultural communication and applauds the recent trend to explore cultural and ideological factors in translation among China’s theorists (p. 98). Echoing Wang Ning on the importance of multiple approaches to translation studies, she endorses the fertilisation that the field in China has received from the West as the basis for exciting developments in this area. As he has in other writings, Edwin Gentzler here advocates extending the purview of translation studies well beyond literature to consider the demands of global business and the rapid expansion of technology. This should prompt the development of more university-level translation studies programmes, but here the US lags behind both Europe and China. From this broader perspective, Gentzler foresees the simplification of source texts to facilitate translation, with a resultant limitation of creativity of expression (however, in such materials as technical manuals, I would see this as a positive step!). His model of reading translations through a variety of analytical lenses will continue to be very helpful in developing interpretive studies of translations. Chen Yongguo’s essay is probably the most abstract in the collection: it addresses the concepts of transgression of the limits of language in translation. His sources are Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari as he concludes, in part: ‘A translator is a critic who takes translation as a form of critique of power relations that are supposed to be the constants and invariants of language, and whose task it is to deconstruct the original to see what emerges from the deconstruction and what new constructions can be formed’ (p. 137). Furthermore, ‘translation is a political-economic activity focusing on the contradiction between intralinguistic difference and extralinguistic values, intersecting both the text-appropriating and world-appropriating activities’ (p. 139). Basing his analysis on Evan-Zohar’s polysystem hypothesis, Wang Dongfeng questions previous speculations about the ‘cultural strengths’ involved in translation and their supposed effects on translation strategy. On the basis of historical experience going back to the translations of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit, Wang concludes that it is the subjective recognition of the position of the target culture that historically has determined translation strategy in China. This allows him to periodise translation practice in China with considerable sophistication. Mao Sihui presents a very convincing analysis of the ‘popular’ film Dawan (Big Shot’s Funeral, 2002), directed by Feng Xiaogang. His sensitive reading of the film’s many levels of cultural critique and artistic parody draws attention to Linda Hutcheon’s characterisation of audiences as ‘co-creators’ of the work of art
especially so in this case when cross-cultural intertextuality is the film’s primary characteristic. Eugene Chen Eoyang concludes the volume with an excellent comparison of ways that three Asian
American authors appropriate English to represent other languages (Korean, Japanese, and

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Cantonese). He concludes that it is indeed possible to articulate antihegemonies in a hegemonic discourse like ‘American English’ (which is itself anything but uniform in use), which complicates earlier readings of postcolonial literature. In general, this collection sets a very high standard for scholarship in translation studies. Every one of these contributions is deeply engaged with current theoretical discussions around the world, while none of these authors is limited by any one theorist or perspective. Regardless of the location from which these scholars write the value of this collection is far more than merely the sum of its individually very considerable parts: the questions raised here are pressing and the interpretations are engaging. Yet the cross-fertilisation of the essays with each other is what makes this collection so outstanding: it is clearly worth reading every essay, from beginning to end. This is an excellent contribution to the broad and international field of translation studies.

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doi: 10.1080/13670050802278140

Robert E. Hegel Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA ([email protected])

Einfu¨hrung in die Translationswissenschaft, Band I: Orientierungsrahmen Erich Pruncˇ. Austria: Institut fu¨r Theoretische und Angewandte Translationswissenschaft, University of Graz, 2003. Pp. 374. (Introduction to Translation Studies. Vol. 1: A Theoretical Framework) ISBN 3-901-54003-2

When I was a student of translation (and even when I became a teacher of translation shortly afterwards), more than 40 years ago, the ‘theoretical’ part of the training programme consisted of some lectures on lexicology and semantics, and a bit of Stylistique Compare´e, and the literature on translation was almost nonexistent. Since then, translation studies has become a fully fledged discipline, and German-speaking scholars like Katharina Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer were indeed pioneers of this development. For today’s students (and teachers) of translation and interpreting, the then open field has turned into a jungle full of strange flora and fauna, and they need some guidelines and signposts to find their way through the confusing but fascinating world of models, theories and practical advice. For them, Erich Pruncˇ, Chair of Translation Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, has written a helpful guidebook, the first of two volumes, that marks out the theoretical framework(s) for the author’s own approach to translation and translation studies, which he promises to explain in detail in Volume 2. The book covers the development of the discipline from the early days of Vinay/Darbelnet, Nida and the Leipzig school, through skopos theory and functional approaches, which seem to have the author’s full sympathies,

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to deconstruction and postcolonial perspectives. It does not deal exhaustively with everything that might be worth mentioning in such an introduction (e.g. the psycholinguistic research into the translation process, the expanding field of translation pedagogy, corpus-based translation studies or interpreting studies), which the author leaves to be discussed in the second part of his opus magnum. After an introductory exploration of the name(s) of the discipline and some of its basic concepts (Chapter 1, pp. 9
32), the readers are invited to join a thematic tour d’horizon based on central topics and paradigms of research: from the early linguistic approaches and the debate on equivalence (Chapter 2, pp. 33
104, including the contributions of Roman Jakobson, Vinay/Darbelnet’s Stylistique Compare´e, the Leipzig school, Werner Koller’s equivalence types and Katharina Reiss’s text type-oriented model of translation criticism), via the specific (cultural) aspects of Nida’s missionary approach to Bible translation (Chapter 3, pp. 105
130, under the misleading heading ‘Translation as Cultural Transfer’), the importance of text linguistics (Chapter 4, pp. 131
153, ‘The Functionality Principle’), the model(s) of translatorial action (Chapter 5, pp. 155
203), comparative and descriptive translation studies focussing on literary translation (Chapter 6, pp. 205
268, including the discussion of norm concepts, polysystem theory, ‘Cultural Turn’, feminist and postcolonial aspects), and, finally, deconstruction (Chapter 7, pp. 269
291, where the theorie is illustrated on the basis of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and its deconstruction by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man). Chapter 8 (pp. 293
295) deals with the so-called Go¨ttingen research group of literary scholars (Go¨ttinger Sonderforschungsbereich), who investigated literary translations and the relations between literatures through translation from a historical and descriptive perspective. Although the members of this group never regarded themselves as translation scholars in a narrower sense, it is not quite plausible why this group deserved a chapter of its own instead of being dealt with, perhaps in the form of an excursus, in the context of Chapter 6. The list of references and sources (pp. 303
351) gives a good impression of the growth of the discipline, and the index of persons and key words does not leave much to be desired. In the concluding remarks (Chapter 9, pp. 297
302), entitled ‘Integration’, the author tries to outline the general trends of development in translation studies. For Erich Pruncˇ, this development is characterised by an alternation of divergence and convergence, symmetry and asymmetry. The first line of development starts with the supposed symmetry between languages and extends to the point where the existing asymmetries between languages seem to make translation impossible. In the second strand of development, the focus of attention is widened to include asymmetries between cultures. With the integration of the dimension of power into the concept of culture, asymmetries of power come to the fore and are dealt with on a historical, local and global level. Parallel to these first trends, the author follows another line of development, from the dethroning of the original text, through the death of the author and the birth of the reader to the death of the original, which is replaced by and reborn through translation. In this context, the author also explores the visibility of translators and their sociopolitical status, which is

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essentially changed through the adoption of feminist and postcolonial perspectives. According to the author, the beginning of the third millennium witnesses two main trends in translation studies: the increasing convergence between the linguistically oriented and the literary oriented schools of research on the one hand, and the call for an abandonment or, at least, a relativisation of eurocentristic concepts of translation on the other hand. German academic prose is often difficult to read, especially for students who are not yet familiar with the terminology and the style conventions of scholarly literature and for nonnatives of German. This book is one of the rare exceptions. It is written in an accessible, reader-friendly, sometimes even amusing style, particularly with regard to chapter and section headings, whose playful use of language and intertextuality may serve as an incentive to open the book on a particular page and start reading. As has been mentioned above, this playfulness sometimes leads to headings or titles in which the appellative function of reading incentive takes priority over the referential function of indicating the content of a chapter or section. However, on the other hand, it may be more important, nowadays, to make students enjoy reading. Definitions, important quotes, graphs, references for further reading (grouped according to topics) and the examples are highlighted in grey, which helps the reader’s orientation and interrupts the monotony of pages full of text. The number of footnotes is limited to an absolute minimum. The languages and cultures covered in the examples, either the author’s own or borrowed from the literature, cover German (often in the Austrian variety, sometimes in South Tyrolean dialect), English, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin (examples from the Bible are quoted from the Vulgate), Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Russian and a great variety of text types and genres. This is not a book that has to be read from cover to cover but rather selecting topics or trends in the recent history of translation studies, as they are grouped in chapters or sections. However, it should be read by every student of translation and/or interpreting with a reasonable knowledge of German
and, hopefully, not only by students but also by those teachers who with regard to the theoretical and methodological foundations of their teaching are often only a few pages ahead of their students, groping their way through the jungle of convergent and divergent views about translation. doi: 10.1080/13670050802332640

Christiane Nord [email protected]

Representing Others. Translation, Ethnography and the Museum Kate Sturge. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007. Pp. xi 198. ISBN 978-1905763-01-6 (pbk): £19.50.

The title of this book hides an ambiguity which the author believes to reveal a promising meeting ground of translation studies on the one hand and

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ethnography (including museum studies) on the other. The English term ‘representation’, as the author explains, is a possible translation of two German words: Darstellung and Vertretung, and thus, combines here the idea of ‘portraying’ and ‘speaking for’ other people. Since these activities are taken to be central for translation and ethnography
‘both claim at once to ‘‘show’’ others to the domestic audience and to speak the others’ words in the language of that audience’ (p. 1)
it may be reasonably expected that critical voices in anthropology and museum studies addressing the dynamic between Darstellung and Vertretung have much to say to the students of translation. The task the author sets herself, accordingly, is to identify and present relevant areas of scholarship. As she modestly (and somewhat surprisingly) ends her introduction, ‘this book doesn’t claim to offer either great depth or complete coverage’ (p. 4). I will tackle the central issue of ‘depth’ in a moment. As for the ‘coverage’, from the point of view of this (admittedly, untutored) reader it is exhaustive and perhaps even too wide-ranging. The first two chapters
‘Translation as Metaphor, Translation as Practice’ and ‘The Translatability of Cultures’
substantiate the claim that the notion of ‘translation’ makes sense not only in reference to texts, but also to cultures. The subsequent three chapters
‘Historical Perspectives’, ‘Critical Innovations in Ethnography’ and ‘Ethnographic Translations of Verbal Art’
show in many ways that ethnography is a kind of translation and discuss the uses of translation in various ethnographic ventures. The last two chapters
‘Museum Representations’ and ‘Ethical Perspectives’
focus on the museum: first, as a vehicle of cultural translation, and then as a locus of ethical challenges. All these chapters are divided into several sections devoted to narrower issues and containing brief presentations and discussions of numerous works. This summary may sound quite superficial but the present reader
faced with the wealth of detail and loosely related material
admits helplessness. Thus, we return to the disclaimer concerning ‘depth’. On one level, the author is too modest: she does take up many intricate subjects which she discusses with great expertise (highly impressive for a student of translation). From a more general perspective, however, she largely limits herself to the presentation of literature and does not provide enough argumentative structure for the book to have a convincing message. What is missing, I believe, is not some highfalutin ‘depth’ but rather greater clarity about the key issue: what is the relationship between the ‘translation of cultures’ and translation sans phrase? I do not question the use of the term ‘translation’ in reference to ethnography and the museum, for there is an intuitive link between providing access to foreign texts and foreign cultures. I would simply expect that the nature of this link should be elucidated (or only put into question) and provisional conclusions (or doubts) serve as the backbone of the book. It is certainly not enough to say that both translation and ethnography ‘claim at once to ‘‘show’’ others to the domestic audience and to speak the others’ words in the language of that audience’. This may be true of ethnography but it misses what I feel to be the crucial feature of translation: it lets others speak for themselves (even if through an intermediary), it lets them cross the threshold of our community.

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Of course, we would need a more elaborate ‘anthropology of translation’ to see better the similarities and differences between translation as such and the translation of culture (or, more narrowly, translation in anthropology). The material so skillfully presented by the author will be of great help in this task and she herself is uniquely qualified to venture in this direction.

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doi: 10.1080/13670050802331873

Andrzej Pawelec Jagiellonian University, Krako´w, Poland [email protected]