Focus on the USA Ed. by Edgar W. Schneider (review)

222 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) baby name, to advertisers' and marketers' concerns with avoiding a faux pas in product naming (cf. the recent Incubus sneaker), names are an area where linguistic research and popular interest intersect. The two works under consideration here, both reference works on the study of names, illustrate two rather different paths to this intersection. Adrian Room, the author of a number of popular reference works on etymology and onomastics, has written a curious dictionary of onomastic terms. His book is a 107-page compilation of terms related to names and naming which includes not only standard terms (colophon, homonym, nom deplume) butalso a great many of R's own coinages. However, it is not clear that terms such as marsionym (names for the planet Mars) ailuronym (cat names), scholionym (collegenames ),anemonym(hurricanenames), andecclesionym (names ofplaces of worship) are necessary or useful coinages. In addition, the coverage in the dictionary is somewhatskewed: aLatinatetermlikefranconym is listed, for example, but there is no coinage for Native American orAfrican American names. The book concludes with a glossary of Greek and Latin elements (109-12) and a select bibliography of (largely popular) works on names and naming. Edwin Lawson's More names and naming is a companion to his 1987 bibliography, Personal names and naming (Westport, CT: Greenwood). Here, L, president of the American Name Society, has compiled a useful bibliography containing over 2000 entries grouped into 47 categories (with about 150 pages devoted to material on ethnic names and naming ). Entries are well-annotated, and sources range from work by Einar Haugen, Franz Boas, and Margaret Bryant to recent PhD dissertations to popular books on names. Such journals as Anthropological Linguistics, Onoma, Nomina, and Name are represented as are the New York Times, The Ladies Home Journal, the Phi Delta Kappan, and similar works. Also represented are such items as The officialpreppy handbook, at one extreme and CIA reports (e.g. on Amharic personal names) on the other. The book concludes with an author index (255-78) and a subject index (279-98). Of the two books, L's is by far the more useful and would be a good addition to any library, personal or institutional. R's work falls short, illustrating a near-fetishization of superfluous naming that is disappointing . [Edwin Battistella, Wayne State CoIduring the winter of 1994-95 at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. The first paper, by Lawrence Venuti, is titled 'Translation and the formation of cultural identities' (9-25); the second, by Candace Séguinot, is titled 'Translation and advertising: Going global' (55-71). Each paper is followed by a transcript of the debate the paper elicited. In her preface, 'Editorial' (1-8), Schaffner makes the point that inasmuch as translations are vital to intercultural communication, a translation ofa source text must be fully intelligible to the members of the society served by the translation. In the first paper, Venuti gives several examples, in some detail, of 'how translation forms particular cultural identities and . . . how it creates possibilities for cultural resistance, innovation, and change' (11). One of his examples has to do with the interpretation of Greek tragedy. Until the publication of John Jones's OnAristotle and Greek tragedy in 1962, individualistic interpretations ofAristotle's Poetics were imposed on the text by scholarly translators, whereas, in Jones's opinion, 'the centre of gravity of Aristotle 's terms is situational and not personal' (11). The long debate (32-54), preceded by Venuti's preliminary remarks (26-31), brings up many interesting points and offers additional examples, grouped together under such headings as the concept of ethnocentricity , foreignizing vs. domesticating, editorial limitations, translation strategies, and translation and social change. Séguinot's paper stresses the need for translators to understand the various aspects of marketing in the country to be served by their translations ofadvertising , including how cultural differences may affect marketing. Many examples are given to illustrate the problems inherent in the translation of advertising. One short example: a translator should know to what extent a culture tolerates directness. Regardless of the original text of an advertisement, in some societies the phrasing 'to stay slim . . .' rather than 'ifyou are fat . . .' may make the...