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Théories contemporaines de la traduction by Robert Larose (review)
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 58, Number 1, Fall 1988
- pp. 180-181
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
180 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 plusieurs, l'ecriture est activite collective pour d'autres. Sont tour atour valorisees ainsi les fonctions textuelles jakobsoniennes referentielle, expressive, poetique, et imperative. Tout aussi diversifies que les conceptions de I'ecriture sont les themes abordes et les formes (car Royer interviewe poetes, romanciers, critiques, essayistes, gens du theatre, tant du Quebec que de France et de quelques autres pays). Malgre les quelques cliches et banalites mentionnes ci-dessus, et I'air parfois convenu de certains propos de presentation par Jean Royer, des quelques-uns des trente-deux ecrivain(e)s interviewe(e)s, Ecrivains contemporains 4, ne serait-ce que pour cette passionnante mise en relief d'une pluralite des conceptions, des themes et des formes de I'ecriture litteraire contemporaine, merite largement la lecture. (NEIL B. BISHOP) Robert Larose. Theories contemporaines de fa traduction Presses de l'Universite du Quebec. 360. $29.00 This is a work for those who translate, who teach and/or evaluate translation, and those who are concerned, as consumers, with the products of translation. It takes for granted, in the reader, a close a~quaintance with contemporary contrastive linguistics and neighbouring disciplines. It surveys and assesses several approaches to the age-old problems of translation, but limits itself approximately to the period 1958-82. The necessary cut-off point, now six years distant, means missing some importantcontributions, including the speciallyinteresting fourth issue of the journal Texte (Toronto 1984) devoted to textuality and translatability, The Manipulation of Literature edited by Theo Harman (1985), and Claude Tatilon's Traduire (1986). In the first part the author, a practising translator and teacher, devotes several chapters to the work of Vinay, Darbelnet, Mounin, Nida, Meschonni~, Catford, Steiner, Ladmiral, Seleskovitch, Delisle, and Newmark, all the while keeping in focus the total picture of the discipline by the use of a dense and detailed footnoting system. The opposing claims of the various schools of the past are dutifully set out, so that one can follow the fortunes of Comparative Stylistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the wars over dynamic equivalence, the case for naturalizing texts in the target language (and the opposing case for letting them remain exotic and visibly translated), the linguistic (and decontextualizing ) approach of Catford, the all-embracing (but unscientific) panorama of human communication from the pen of George Steiner. The most important question of all (roughly put: Is translation possible?) is never far from the author's thoughts (or the reader's) and we swing, in this historical survey, from postulates of despair such as that nothing is HUMANITIES 181 communicable or translatable, to the opposite pole where everything is translatable into any language, as long as humanity recognizes that a degree of approximation is an acceptable human characteristic. Naturally enough, no book can satisfy all needs. I ran a check on my own particular interest, the translation ofplays of the past for present-day performance. While Newmark is shown to be particularly sensitive to the problems presented by prestige texts, it is also clear that such translation involves far more than either he or Larose hints at or suspects. The semiosis ofdrama, as studiedby Kowzan, Serpieri, Elam, Ubersfeld, et aI, and approached as a translation problem by Bassnett-McGuire, might enter the discussion here and does not. Other readers seeking similar 'specialized' problems may also find that delimitation works against them. The author has had carefully to tailor what is already a book of imposing density. The first part reads well despite a maddening lack of common terminology. So much conceptualizing has gone on since the prelinguistic days when translation was discussed by way of the amiable anecdote and the plain talk of practically acquired wisdom that many individually-arrived-at concepts have passed into the epistemological inventory with multiple labels. Larose collects and analyses admirably, but stops short of laying down the law on terminology. Yet that is arguably what will be needed if further discourse is to be clear-headed. The second part is about textual analysis and parameters for the assessment of translations. There is an interesting account of the evaluation system (SICAL) used by the Government of Canada Translation Bureau, which minimizes the subjective nature of...