Terminologie de la traduction (review)

This terminology collection is written primarily for translators in training and their teachers and for authors of translation textbooks. But it can also be a useful tool for foreign language specialists, applied linguists, or anyone else having to describe translation phenomena. The work is more specialized and narrower in scope than other recently published books on translation vocabulary (such as Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowie’s Dictionary of translation studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997, or the Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies, London: Routledge, 1998). While these latter attempt to cover all the concepts current in the field of translation studies, the present volume, by contrast, limits its coverage to approximately 200 key concepts, considered to be the most useful for teaching translation in four languages (French, English, Spanish, and German).

Although this book is catalogued under its French title, the English, Spanish, and German equivalent titles do appear on the book cover. And while the terminology of each language group has been treated equally, one still senses that French is somehow the dominant language or source language of the collection. Indeed, the opening section (Part 1) is ‘Terminologie française’ (2–106), Part 2 ‘English terminology’ (107–212), Part 3 ‘Terminología española’ (213–322), and Part 4 ‘Deutsche Terminologie’ (323–433) follow. Each language section includes a four-page introduction, a list of signs and abbreviations, the dictionary articles (which vary in length from a few lines to a page or more), a dozen illustrative tables (designed to help the reader understand the relationships between the concepts), and an end-bibliography (varying in length from three pages in the English section to nine pages in the German).

The ultimate decision as to what constitutes membership in this specialized dictionary was made by a group of nearly twenty translation teachers and terminologists from universities in eight countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela). They chose the 200 key concepts which actually appear in the volume (from an original list of 1,419 terms, or 838 concepts, drawn up by Delisle and his collaborators in a preliminary study conducted on translation teaching handbooks).

In elaborating the vocabulary the authors chose to follow the methodology originally established by the Office de la langue française, in Québec, in which term entries are established on the basis of concept systems and conceptual subfields. The concepts are rigorously defined; synonyms, quasisynonyms, orthographic variants, and abbreviations are listed; detailed notes and examples accompany the definitions to make the concepts easier to understand; and the terms in each section of the book are cross-listed. For instance, we note that ‘coinage’ (125) is synonymous with ‘coined term’; that it has been provided with two cross-references, ‘barbarism’ and ‘lacuna’; and that it is cross-listed with ‘mot forgé’ in French, ‘palabra creada’ in Spanish, and ‘ad hoc-Wortbildung’ in German.

Recognizing that it would be impossible to maintain complete parallelism among the conceptual network of the four languages, the authors have adapted the terminology of each language group to the individual needs of the French, English, Spanish, and German linguistic communities, in accordance with their pedagogical practices and traditions (109). It is for this reason, to cite an example, that the French term ‘déterminants juxtaposés’ is cross-listed only with the Spanish term ‘predeterminantes’ (and vice versa); there is no parallel in English or German.

The terms included here are used to describe distinct language events, the cognitive aspects involved in the translation process, the procedures involved in transfer from one language to another, and the results of these operations (109). A few well-known basic concepts from the adjacent fields of grammar, linguistics, and rhetoric are also included (e.g. aspect, contrastive linguistics, metaphor).

While I find this book extremely useful, and will certainly recommend it to my students (who will be grateful to the authors for having assembled this collection...