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BOOK REVIEWS
Elbieta Wòjcik-Leese a
a
Jagiellonian University, Krakòw, Poland

Online Publication Date: 15 March 2007

To cite this Article Wòjcik-Leese, Elbieta(2007)'BOOK REVIEWS',Perspectives,15:1,66 — 67

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 Book Reviews
Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account
Mona Baker. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 208. ISBN 10: 0-415-38396-X (pbk):
£20. ISBN 10: 0-415-38395-1 (hbk): £70. ISBN 10: 0-203-09991-5 (E-book): £20.

Since 1992, Professor Mona Baker from the Centre for Translation and
Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester has produced several
notable works on translation
including In Other Words: A Coursebook on
Translation (1992) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (chief
editor, 1998)
which have exerted a tremendous influence on those interested
in translation studies. Mona Baker’s latest publication, Translation and Conflict:
A Narrative Account (2006), rigorously examines the relation between transla-
tion, power and conflict from a narrative perspective and may constitute yet
another turning point in Translation Studies. This groundbreaking volume
demonstrates that translation is never merely a by-product of social and
political developments, but a part of the institution of war, and examines the
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role played by translators and interpreters in mediating conflict and resisting

the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent
conflict. Drawing on narrative theory and using numerous examples from
historical as well as contemporary conflicts, the author provides an original
and coherent model of analysis that pays equal attention to the context of the
circulation of narratives in translation, to translation and interpreting, and to
political questions of dominance and resistance.
This book includes seven chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2, the author gives a
brief introduction of narrative theory particularly suited to investigating the
way in which translators and interpreters function in situations of conflict. She
points out the advantages of narrative theory to account for the interplay
between translation, power and conflict. Mona Baker draws on the notion of
narrative as elaborated in social and communication theory, rather than in
narratology or linguistics, to explore the way in which translation and
interpreting participate in these processes. Narratives, therefore, are under-
stood as dynamic and open entities. According to this narrative theory,
narratives not only represent social reality, but also constitute crucial means of
generating, sustaining and negotiating conflict at all levels of social organisa-
tion. In view of the narrative perspective, the author discusses the political
import of narratives, the interaction of resistance and dominance evident in
the way narratives are illustrated and received, and the intimate relations
between translation and political factors.
In Chapter 3, Mona Baker discusses four types of narrative (ontological
narratives, public narratives, conceptual or disciplinary narratives and meta-
narratives) and the way in which translators and interpreters mediate their
circulation in society. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a profound and comprehensive
analysis of the typology and features of narrativity, namely, the core features of
temporality, relationality, causal emplotment and selective appropriation, and
the supplementary features of particularity, genericness, normativeness and

57
 58 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

narrative accrual. The discussion of typology and features makes us further

understand the complex ways in which narrativity mediates our experience of
the world and its potential application in translation studies.
In Chapter 6, the author combines the narrative theory and translation
studies by way of the notion of frame as elaborated in the work of Goffman
and the literature on social movements, focusing on four key strategies
for translators, interpreters and other agents to accentuate, undermine or
modify aspects of the narratives encoded in the source text or utterance,
namely, ‘temporal and spatial framing’, ‘framing through selective appropria-
tion’, ‘framing by labeling’ and ‘repositioning of participants’. She introduces
the two important concepts of ‘frame ambiguity’ and ‘frame space’ and points
out that the different and conflicting international parties can successfully
achieve their political purposes by consciously using various strategies
mentioned above, and that as translators are not neutral, they will adopt
appropriate strategies to achieve their communicative purpose according to
different contexts. Among the four strategies, Mona Baker highlights ‘framing
through selective appropriation’ and ‘repositioning of participants’ and
illustrates her points with a lot of examples. For example, in discussing the
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former strategy, she explains how in The Slave-King (1833), the first English
translation of Victor Hugo’s novel Bug-Jargal (1826), with its troublingly
ambiguous portrayal of slavery, slavery is now modified into a dastardly
institution in need of eradication.
In Chapter 7, Mona Baker gives an insightful analysis and appreciation of
Walter Fisher’s influential narrative paradigm and points out its advantages: it
allows us to assess a narrative elaborated in a single text as well as diffuse
narratives that have to be pieced together from a variety of sources and media;
it can also be used to assess any narrative: ontological, public or conceptual,
whether elaborated by an individual or an institution. The author concludes
with a critical review of translation studies from a narrative perspective and
predicts the future development of this paradigm.
The main features of this book are as follows. (1) It successfully gives a
critical theoretical analysis, with rich corpus-based studies. (2) Many vivid
pictures and fresh examples are used and illustrated in the book. (3)
Suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter so as
to provide much more useful materials for those interested in translation
studies, intercultural studies, sociology and history. (4) The book cover is so
illuminating that it attracts a lot of readers.
Equipped with all the above-mentioned qualities, this book is all in all a
very useful and handy reference for learners and researchers interested in both
cross-cultural studies and translation studies. Therefore, it is strongly
recommended.

doi: 10.2167/pstb001.0 Fan Min

School of Foreign Languages and Literature
Shandong University, China
 Book Reviews 59

Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies

Jan Van Coillie and Walter P. Verschueren (eds). Manchester: St Jerome
Publishing, 2006. Pp. 190. ISBN 1-900650-88-6 (pbk): £22.50.

For children who do not master foreign languages, translations are the sole
means of entering into genuine contact with foreign literatures and cultures.
Owing to translators’ efforts, ‘children all over the world can step through the
magical looking-glass and venture into the beguiling world of Andersen’s
fairy tales and Alice’s unexpected, mind-boggling Wonderland, or can indulge
in the charmingly anarchistic fabrications of Pippi Longstocking, and
more
recently
the thrilling, often spine-chilling, universe of Harry Potter’ (p. v).
Today translating for children is increasingly recognised as a literary challenge
in its own right, because translators are not only mediators who facilitate the
negotiating ‘dialogue’ between source text and target audience, but also ones
who hold a fragile, unstable middle position between the social forces that act
upon them, their own interpretation of the source text and their assessment of
the target audience; translators mediate, but to an important extent they also
shape the image that young readers or listeners will have of the translated
work.
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Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies is of great value

because it tackles a long-neglected subfield of literary translation. It has
endeavoured to explore the various challenges posed by the paradigmatic shift
in research
its focus shifting from the source text to the target text
while at
the same time highlighting some of the strategies that translators can and do
follow when faced with challenges such as the impact of translational norms,
the choice between foreignising and domesticating translation, and the dual
audience (children and adults). Translating for children is no less demanding
than translating ‘serious’ (adult) literature, and very often the creative, playful
use of language is even more challenging as it requires a special empathy with
the imaginative world of the child. Luckily, we now witness a significant
growth in scholarly interest as well as the visibility gained by translators of
children’s literature.
The volume comprises 11 articles. The opening essay ‘The Translator
Revealed’ reviews historical and contemporary prefaces to translated chil-
dren’s books published in the UK. By analysing the prefaces by Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Howitt, Joan Aiken and Ann Lawson Lucas, Gillian
Lathey concludes that, viewed historically, translators’ prefaces offer rare
insights into the selection of texts for translation, developments in translation
practices and changes in the image of the child reader. Therefore, she ends her
essay with emphasising the significance of the translator’s position within the
history of British children’s literature, for the reason that ‘there is the
opportunity to exercise choice in the selection of texts for translation’ and
‘there is considerable evidence in these prefaces that translators are active and
creative mediators’ (p. 16), thus trying to seek the voices of as many of these
lost translators as possible and bring them to attention.
The second essay, Rita Ghesquiere’s ‘Why Does Children’s Literature Need
Translation?’, also working from a historical perspective, deals with how
in a
polysystemic context
translations have helped children’s literature to fulfil a
 60 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

basic role in the establishment of literary canons. It reviews the present-day

situation of children’s literature worldwide and discusses commercialisation
and the dominance of Westernised books in order to answer the question
whether the import of Western books is a hindrance to the development of
native (non-Western) children’s literatures.
Riitta Oittinen’s ‘No Innocent Act: On the Ethics of Translating for Children’
states that translating may be defined as rereading and rewriting for target
audiences, and translating for children inevitably uses the domesticating
strategy reflecting the ethics, values and norms of a given society that lie
dormant in the translator’s personal child(hood) image.
In her ‘Flying High
Translation of Children’s Literature in East Germany’,
Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemut discusses how children’s books were selected so
as to play a role in the creation of an ideal socialist society and how the
translated books enjoyed a remarkably high status because of their important
function in educating the masses.
Vanessa Joosen, in her ‘From Breaktime to Postcards: How Aidan Chambers
Goes (or Does Not Go) Dutch’, by analysing in depth the Dutch translations of
the two novels, Breaktime and Postcards From No Man’s Land, draws our
attention to the shift from focusing on Chambers’ (one of the most popular
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translated authors of adolescent fiction in Belgium and the Netherlands) use of

taboo language to a greater awareness of his stylistic complexity (a mixture of
Dutch and English), a particular challenge to the translator.
Isabelle Desmidt’s ‘A Prototypical Approach within Descriptive Translation
Studies? Colliding Norms in Translated Children’s Literature’ investigates to
what extent a prototypical approach may help to define translation in an
adequate way (both descriptive and specific), departing from Chesterman’s
Default Prototype Concept. She calls for an adjustment or refinement of
Chesterman’s model, as she believes that children’s literature should be
translated in a specific way. Nevertheless she concludes that the prototype
approach promises to remain a valuable future tool for translation studies.
The next two essays state that traditionally, most translators of children’s
literature held the belief that the source text should be adapted to the target
culture in order to guarantee children readers a sufficient degree of
recognisability and empathy. But today more and more translators choose to
retain a degree of ‘foreignness’ in their translations because they want to bring
children into contact with other cultures. In the essay ‘Translating Cultural
Intertextuality in Children’s Literature’, Belén González-Cascallana explores
culture-bound problems in translating children’s literature by focusing on the
handling of cultural intertextuality in the Spanish translations of contempor-
ary British children’s fantasy books. The author demonstrates that the
translations discussed do not fully favour either domestication or foreign-
isation of source text features because while the translator’s aim is to ‘stay
close to the source text and to expose the target child audience to the
experience of the foreign text’ (p. 108), in other ways the translator does show
a concern for the target readers’ comprehension and their ability to enjoy the
presence of intertextuality. By applying the polysystem theory to studying the
strategies found in an English and Spanish translation of a German youth
novel, Isabel Pascua-Febles’ ‘Translating Cultural References: The Language of
 Book Reviews 61

Young People in Literary Texts’ focuses on social and educational conventions

and the way different translators address young readers through juvenile
expressions and cultural markers such as diastratic and diaphasic varieties.
In ‘Character Names in Translation’, Jan Van Coillie, by investigating the
translation of personal names from a functional perspective, discusses how the
translators’ choices can cause texts to function differently (via shifts occurring
in their informative, educational, emotional, entertaining and creative func-
tion). His study also sheds a different light on the concept of functional
equivalence, because factors other than text and translator ‘can have an impact
on the translation of personal names’ (p. 136).
The last two essays explore the ambivalent audience (young and adult
readers). Anette Øster’s ‘Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in Translation’
examines two English translations of Andersen’s fairy tales and shows how
they are stripped of their double audience: not only are sexual overtones and
irony removed, but also their richness of detail and linguistic fitness are lost

something at odds with the original, as Andersen himself was well aware of
his double audience. In their paper, ‘Dual Readership and Hidden Subtexts in
Children’s Literature’, Mette Rudvin and Francesca Orlati, by examining the
translations of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories into Norwegian
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and Italian, show that this double orientation (Rushdie’s novel can be read
both as a fairy tale for children and as a political critique aimed at an adult
readership) results in complex translation strategies. This raises a series of
interesting translation issues such as ‘the micro-structural co-ordination of
culture specificities, the macro-structural marketing policies dictating the
translating strategies of the political subcontext through metaphor’ (p. 157),
the status of the target reader, and the place of translators and translations
within the polysystem and the wider social system.
The book perfectly bridges the gap between theory and practice, which
makes its arguments even more convincing. It has benefited greatly from
theoretical developments in the fields of literary and translation studies, such
as Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, Gideon Toury’s concept of norms
of translational behaviour, Lawrence Venuti’s concept of the translator’s
(in)visibility and of foreignising and domesticating translations, Chesterman’s
prototypical approach and the concept of the child(hood) image. And it
applies the theories to such topics as the ethics of translating for children, the
importance of child(hood) images, the ‘revelation’ of the translator in prefaces,
the role of translated children’s books in the establishment of literary canons,
the status of translations in former East Germany, questions of taboo and
censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in
different translations of a Swedish children’s classic, the handling of ‘cultural
intertextuality’ in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy
books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions,
functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with
character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the
dual audience in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales and in Salman
Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
What impresses me most is that 10 out of the 12 authors are female, which
poses an interesting question: why are so many women engaged in studying
 62 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

and translating children’s literature? To me, it might be due to their family role
in society, their psychological makeup and their great maternal love for
children.
The list of contributors at the end of the book not only offers their academic
background; it is also helpful for cross-national communication among
translation researchers and practitioners.
Now we are very interested in raising the translator’s status, but how? In
this book the essay ‘Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in Translation’ is
written by Anette Øster (in Danish) and translated by Don Bartlett. However,
the author’s name is put at the beginning of the essay and the translator’s at
the end. I don’t think it appropriate to treat the author and the translator
differently. I maintain that we translators or translation researchers ourselves
should be the first to put authors and translators in the same place because
they are of the same importance. If even we don’t do this, why should others? I
propose that both the author’s and the translator’s names should be placed at
the beginning of the essay in order to demonstrate their equal status. The
journals and books published in China such as Chinese Translators’ Journal set a
good example in this respect.
In conclusion, the anthology under review is extremely useful; it is one of
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the few books on children’s literature in translation, and it reflects the recent
developments in this special field. It offers excellent guidance and orientation
to students of children’s literature in translation, and although its essays
explore children’s literature in translation in a Western context, it is also of
great significance in an international context.

doi: 10.2167/pstb002.0 Xu Jianzhong

College of Foreign Languages
Tianjin University of Technology, China

The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse Practices of the Law, the

Witness and the Interpreter
Sandra Beatriz Hale. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp.
xviii265. Europe: ISBN 90 272 1658 4; USA: ISBN 1 58811 517 8 (hbk): t105/
US$126.

The book under review deals with one of the most topical present-day fields of
Translation Studies, i.e. the scholarly issues of court interpreting discourse. The
hypothesis underlying the author’s study is that ‘interpreters are mostly
concerned with maintaining accuracy of content alone, the ‘‘what’’ and not
the ‘‘how’’’ (p. 238). This hypothesis has determined the aim of the book, which
is seen in the analysis of the complex relationship between form and function
within the context of interpreter-mediated speech (p. 7). Hence, the main focus
of the monograph is the interpreting process delivery phase that, as the author
states, ‘has been perhaps the most neglected one in the study and training’ (p. 5).
The structure of the book is in concordance with the above aim and focus
and is as follows: Chapter 1. Court Interpreting: The Main Issues; Chapter 2.
Historical Overview of Court Interpreting in Australia; Chapter 3. Courtroom
Questioning and the Interpreter; Chapter 4. The Use of Discourse Markers in
 Book Reviews 63

Courtroom Questions; Chapter 5. The Style of the Spanish Speaking Witnesses’

Answers and the Interpreters’ Renditions; Chapter 6. Control of the Court-
room; Chapter 7. The Interpreters’ Response; Chapter 8. Conclusions. The
monograph is prefaced by Acknowledgements and Introduction, and com-
pleted by Notes, References and Index.
I definitely feel it should be noted to the author’s credit that one of the most
successful parts is about the history of court interpreting in Australia. It would
have been to still better advantage if Sandra Beatriz Hale made general
references to the worldwide history of court interpreting, since as we all
understand, it originated in 1945. This history is far from being too long and
too complicated and there are initial facts really worth mentioning. However,
even though the author confines herself to the history of interpreting in
Australia, the chapter is informative and relevant. So, the first government
interpreter service in Australia dates back to 1954, and since that time it has
evolved to enact legislation on a person’s rights to the services of an interpreter
in the states of Victoria and South Australia, while in other jurisdictions it is
the presiding judicial officer who decides whether an interpreter is needed or
not (Report on a National Language Policy (1984: 39) as quoted in Hale: 23). The
most blossoming years for the interpreting trade were the 1980s, when the
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states had an institution that offered a Bachelor’s degree in the field. At

present, only the University of Western Sydney offers degrees in legal
interpreting
in nine languages (Hale: 26).
The author points out that the study was conducted with 13 English

Spanish interpreted court hearings during the years 1993
1996. The figure of
13 hearings seems sufficient to arrive at a number of scholarly conclusions, one
of the interesting being that tag questions are one of the things that cause
interpreters most difficulty. The data show that interpreters omit the tag
53.12% of the time. The explanation is found in a wider range of tags in
English as compared to Spanish, where tags are the invariant tag questions,
such as (if translated into English) Isn’t that right? Right? True? Is it true? Is it
correct? (pp. 44, 46). Another reason may be that not every rendition can
maintain the same pragmatic force as the given source language tag. For
example, to say ‘You saw him by accident, did you?’ is not the same as ‘You
saw him by accident, true?’ According to Hale, ‘the first one is rectifying a
false prior belief’ while ‘the second one is stating what the speaker believes to
be the case and asking for ratification of the same’ (p. 51). Still another problem
is checking tags believed to be the most aggressive. When said with a falling
intonation they present a strong assumption and expect an answer that agrees
with that assumption (p. 52).
Worthwhile information is provided concerning such discourse markers as
‘well’, ‘see’ and ‘now’. The author emphasises that the use of these markers
varies according to the type of discourse: whether they appear in examination-
in-chief or cross-examination. In examination-in-chief, they are used to
maintain control of the flow of information and mark progression in the
story. In cross-examination, they are used as markers of argumentation and
confrontation that initiate disagreements or challenges (pp. 85, 86).
The author also tackles psycholinguistic issues when she discusses the style
of the Spanish-speaking witnesses’ answers and the interpreters’ renditions. It
 64 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

is assumed that there is a strong correlation between how people speak and
how they impress their listeners in terms of their social status, personality,
intelligence, trustworthiness and competence. Here she studies hesitations,
repetitions, backtracking, pauses and hedges as well as grammatical errors in
court interpreting discourse. Her data contain 1379 answers with a total
number of 15,053 Spanish words (pp. 87, 95, 96). Hale concludes that the
interpreted English shows a higher frequency of hesitations and grammatical
errors, while there are fewer repetitions, backtrackings, pauses and hedges in
the interpreted variant than in the original Spanish discourse. (I should like to
mention right here that after all, repetitions, errors, backtrackings, etc. are all
about hesitation: a speaker would not backtrack or make an understatement or
whatsoever in case he/she were confident of the subject in case. So the chapter
is positively about hesitations only, which should have been used as an
umbrella term.) Moreover, the author writes that interpreters tend to
constantly alter witnesses’ speech styles in their interpretations (p. 156).
A challenging chapter is about how to keep power and control in the
courtroom. If we accept the author’s approach, we should follow the following
path: ‘a person’s power lies in his/her ability to control his/her own actions,
and to control the actions of others, despite resistance. This book deals with the
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context of the courtroom, where there are clearly powerful and powerless
participants’ (p. 159), the former being the lawyers and the bench who can ask
questions and control the information, whereas the latter are witnesses, who
must answer the question without digressing from the relevant themes
(Atkinson & Drew 1979; Merry, 1990; Drew, 1992 as quoted in Hale: 160).
However, this seems to be the field of psychology rather than Translation
Studies or linguistics, although Hale states that ‘linguistic control has been
said to be one important aspect of exercising power over others’ (Morris, 1949;
Foucault, 1977; Pondy, 1978; Bourdieu, 1991 as quoted in Hale: 159). Of course,
we cannot do without the language in many fields, like philosophy, philology,
psychiatry, legal studies and psychology. Still, such issues are psychology, with
linguistics as a runner-up there. As if to support my line, the author goes on to
say that the ‘general rule is for all directive speech acts to originate with the
powerful participants of the courtroom’ (p. 162). However, the chapter
discloses that ‘although control is mostly held by the counsel, it sometimes
shifts to the witness, to the interpreter and to the magistrate. Such power shifts
were mostly a consequence of witness initiative and sometimes produced by
the presence of the interpreter’
whose presence may sometimes interfere
with the counsel’s strategies (p. 210).
The author then tries to support her findings in an experimental part where
she consults a group of interpreters through a questionnaire on the main issues
of her book, for example interpreter renditions of ‘now’, ‘you see’, ‘well’, tag
questions, etc. Hale’s conclusion at this part is as follows: the majority of
respondents claim witnesses’ incoherence and colloquial speech to be the main
cause of difficulty in interpreting. Generally, the results of the survey proved
more positive than those of the authentic courtroom hearings (pp. 232
233).
As I have quoted above, the author’s two main questions are ‘what’ and
‘how’. So a logical follow-up will be the big question ‘why’. I often ask this
question which sounds irritating to some authors, for whatever reason.
 Book Reviews 65

Anyway, I ask it to see what is there in the background that made the book
possible, for one thing. For another (and that is what I should like to ask of
Sandra Beatriz Hale), why has she thought it appropriate to put within one
volume topics that should rather go in different books? The major part of the
book is about ‘a micro analysis of questions and answers taken from Local
Court hearings’ (p. 211). Fine, so let the monograph be on this theme, entitled
‘Questions, Markers and Hesitations in Court Interpreting’. That would be
quite suitable for the contents, as ‘The Discourse of Court Interpreting’
followed by the subtitle ‘Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness and the
Interpreter’ is too general. The author deals with a very small part of the said
discourse; this book is not about the whole linguistic practice of lawmaking
and justice, as the author’s title may suggest.
My second ‘why’
or, to use the author’s term, my hesitation
is about
psycholinguistic and psychological issues discussed in the book. I suppose
they deserve a separate volume on what people do in court to control the
situation. The methodology of the monograph the way it is can be defined as
eclectic, as it is a combination of Translation Studies methods and those of
linguistics, culture, psycholinguistics and even psychology. These are all very
different fields enjoying their own research topics, aims, tasks and methods.
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However, these comments are merely trifles. The book has impressed me as
a substantial study of courtroom interpreting practices by a knowledgeable
specialist.

doi: 10.2167/pstb003.0 Vladimir Khairoulline

Ufa, Russia

Proust’s English
Daniel Karlin. London: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 229. ISBN 0-19-
925688-4 (hbk): £27, US$45. ISBN 0-19-925689-1 (pbk): £15.

Charming, erudite, ingenious, this focused examination of A la recherche du

temps perdu can expect an appreciative, but highly limited, audience. What
Karlin has done is look for echoes of English as exemplified by both the chic
and chi-chi Anglomania in the Ile-de-France from 1870 to 1917. Only readers
who already know the novel in its entirety well can savour the intricacies and
imbrications of anglophile taste and expressions, usually in French disguise.
After all, neither Proust nor his persona Marcel knew English. Indeed, when
characters speak so that ‘Marcel’ will not understand them, they switch to
English, and their dialogue goes unrecorded. ‘Marcel’ also continually mocks
the semi-literate use of French by the continental staff at Balbec or among rural
French getting acclimated to Paris slang. ‘Marcel’ makes a trip to Venice, but
none of his travel fantasies involve London. Moreover, it is well documented
that Proust’s translations of Ruskin relied heavily on his mother’s and Marie
Nordlinger’s rough drafts.
Nonetheless, Karlin, who tackles the ops stereoscopically, using the
Moncrieff-Mayor-Enright translations for Random House vis-à-vis the Tadié
Pléiade edition, shows that Proust’s characterisations and milieus for which
his ear was unerring, made English a credible subtext that pierces the surface
 66 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

text with intrusions like ‘home’ and ‘fishing for compliments’. The entry of
each Anglicism into French is fastidiously traced.
Karlin’s delight in deconstructionist etymologising is a further demonstra-
tion that stereoscopic reading and deconstruction form a felicitous critical ploy.
As for the semantic spaces between the French and the English, these appear in
ingenious backtracking that makes English not only a source of ‘mots retrouvés’,
but also
despite vociferous calls for an uncontaminated French
a source for
language enrichment.

doi: 10.2167/pstb004.0 Marilyn Gaddis Rose

State University of New York at Binghamton, USA

If This Be Treason. Translation and its Dyscontents. A Memoir

Gregory Rabassa. New York: New Directions, 2005. Pp. 192. ISBN 0-8112-1619-5
(cloth). US$21.95.

If we hope to pick up tricks of the trade from ‘the best Latin American writer
in the English language’, as Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez complimented his
translator, we will soon be rather dismayed at the translation strategies
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advocated by Gregory Rabassa. ‘Following the words of the original’ seems

nowhere near as informative as ‘cultural transfer, amplification, compensation
method, adaptation, etc.’; yet it is precisely this academic jargon that Rabassa
wants to avoid
just as he steers clear of anything that smacks of the
postmodern. Instead, he offers us a good old memoir which, paradoxically,
recollects 30 authors he has translated so far, starting with Julio Cortázar.
Turning Rayuela into Hopscotch has turned Rabassa into a translator whose
main motto is: ‘a good translation is a good reading’ (p. 49). As ‘every reader
reads his or her own book’ (p. 74), it should come as no surprise that Rabassa
does not care to comment on other people’s versions
‘we all read differently,
except that a translator’s reading remains in unchanging print’ (p. 89).
And how does Gregory Rabassa read? What do these recollections reveal?
He seems to enjoy the complex narratives of magic realism or, if we are to
believe him, these complicated stories seem to search him out. Jokingly, he
explains that his WWII cryptographic practice at the Office of Strategic
Services might have predisposed him to commit himself to such books. He
translates as he reads, believing that this lends the English version the
freshness of a first reading. Choosing good authors himself or following
recommendations of his (former) students guarantees a successful translation:
‘the masters will enable you to render their prose into the best possible
translation if you only let yourself be led by their expression, following the
only possible way to go. If you ponder you will have lost the path’ (p. 17).
This kind of apprenticeship will hopefully show the translator how to be
a writer. The method of ‘learning by doing’ (p. 63) underpins this chrono
logical presentation from the first translation of 1966 to the most recent of 2004
and a couple awaiting their publishers. Anecdotal, with frequent glances at the
problems posed by translating titles, proper names or registers, the
30 accounts together with the introductory reflections on translation as treason
and the final verdict: ‘not proven’ testify to Rabassa’s versatility, erudition and
 Book Reviews 67

intuition, the desirable characteristics of ‘brilliant amateurs’ (p. 68). They also
prove his humour, modesty and his unfailing respect for the authors he has
followed word by word.

doi: 10.2167/pstb005.0 Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

[Cultural Translation and the Interpretation of Literary

Canons]
Ning Wang. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2006. Pp. vii343. ISBN
7-101-05047-6: RMB 24.

With an impressive publication record in both English and Chinese, Wang

Ning is one of the few native Chinese who have broken the Sino
Anglo/
Western linguistic
cultural barrier and emerged in the international academic
community as figures of considerable recognition. Now this status is all the
more consolidated with this publication in Chinese (following his English-
language volume Globalization and Cultural Translation from 2004). Dealing
again with ‘cultural translation’, this Chinese volume is largely a collection of
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papers published before and translated or rewritten for the present purpose.
A typical representative of the discourse on translation and culture in
China, this book is no doubt a forward step over the traditional anthro-
pological
linguistic sense of culture and translation typically represented by
the overdue conventional addiction to Eugene Nida’s theory of translation
(Bassnett, 1998: 129
132).
Wang Ning’s book consists of a tripartite body and an appendix. Part 1
centres on the issue of cultural translation. Sequentially discussed here are six
major issues, namely the translatology turn put forward as a way out for
cultural studies now commonly recognised as trapped in a bottleneck of
development (Ch. 1), the embedment of translation studies within cultural
studies for a full display of the dialogic and coordinative function of translation
in the context of globalisation (Ch. 2), the disciplinary status of translation
studies as a science (Ch. 3), the proposal of different levels of correspondence or
equivalence setting cultural translation as the ideal, though only partially
possible in real practice (Ch. 4), the reconstruction of China’s critical discourse
through theoretical translation (Ch. 5) and the role of diasporic writing
(especially in English) in accelerating the globalisation of Chinese literature
and culture (Ch. 6).
Part 2 moves on to the recanonisation in translation as the interpretation of
culture. Translation is here posed as a means to question and reconstruct the
literary canons. Picking up the three ways out proposed for cultural studies in
the first chapter of Part 1 (p. 12), Chapter 1 explores the canon formation in the
cultural interpretation (i.e. translation) of literature on the basis of a case study
of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Using English as a
reference point, Chapter 2 explores the role of the globalisation-driven
worldwide spread of Chinese in the rewriting process of the history of
Chinese literature and Chinese literatures. Chapter 3 elaborates on China’s
(post)modernity as the result of translation and hybridisation that are mainly
 68 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

evidenced in Lin Shu’s translation practice. Chapter 4 is on the glocalisation

strategy of cultural translation and its dual role of translation in its cultural
colonisation and decolonisation. The last three chapters are case studies of,
respectively, Walt Whitman’s crucial role in the formation of China’s
modernity (Ch. 5), the foundational significance of M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror
and the Lamp for the global spread of Romanticism as the earliest attempt of
world literature at the ‘cultural globalisation’ (Ch. 6) and the first-time
proposal to the international academic circles of the concept of open-ended,
future-oriented and thus ever (un)translatable ‘Ibsenisation’ as a principle of
postmodern aesthetics (Ch. 7).
Part 3 puts emphasis on the overall review of cultural studies and the
interpretation of cultural theories. Chapter 1 focuses on the latest development
and the future prospect of cultural studies in the context of globalisation.
Picking up again the three ways out proposed for cultural studies in the first
chapter of Part 1 (p. 12), this chapter puts forward the strategy of conforming
with the globalising trend and seeking from it chances to develop and spread
Chinese culture worldwide (pp. 211
214). This decolonising or glocalising

that is, globalising in the reverse direction, or minoritising in Homi Bhabha’s
words (p. 206)
strategy is carried into Chapter 2 (pp. 221
232, 235
236),
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which is on the cultural analysis of Chinese films in the context of

globalisation. Besides the above film studies, other recent and most promising
theoretical areas are outlined in the next two chapters, respectively gender and
queer studies (both issuing from the turn from social status to gender
uniqueness in feminism) in Ch. 3, and the picture theory and the turn from
phono/ideographical to iconographical criticism in Ch. 4. In the last two
chapters, the writer puts forward the strategy for the globalisation of China’s
humanities and social sciences on the basis of the case studies of Mikhail
Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida. Both theoreticians have had a great influence in
Western academic circles. While Bakhtin’s case is used to illustrate Said’s
notion of travelling theory and the importance of translation to the globalisa-
tion of China’s studies of Bakhtin, Derrida’s case study offers a summary of
Derrida’s deconstructive theory and its methodological relevance for the
studies of language, culture and translation.
The Appendix consists of two dialogues offering a discursive summary of
Wang Ning’s key viewpoints and an illustration of the dialogicity underlying
all his theoretical undertakings. The first one is conducted between Douwe
Fokkema and Wang Ning, revolving around four issues: the future prospect of
the discipline of comparative literature, the studies of the influence of the
Chinese literature and culture on Europe (a topic on which Qian Zhongshu is
clearly a forerunner), the conflict between comparative literature and cultural
studies, and the question of diaspora. There are (dis)agreements in each issue,
and one cautional remark Fokkema makes twice in the discussion is the lack of
a sound methodology in Wang Ning’s undertakings of the second and the
fourth.1 The second dialogue, more like an interview of Wang Ning by Sheng
Anfeng, is about Wang Ning’s stance on eight issues of concern in today’s
academic circles in China, ranging from the disciplinary status of translatology
and the function of translation for (de)colonisation to the influence of Chinese
literature in Western countries and the relationship between literary theory
 Book Reviews 69

and translation studies. Both dialogues provide a shortcut to Wang Ning’s

viewpoints on many issues.
Viewed as a whole, Wang Ning’s argumentation has several cornerstones,
including the themes of globalisation and glocalisation, Edward Said’s notion
of travelling theory and Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural translation. It is
indeed admirable to cohere all these into an organic whole. Its significance
could only emerge through a closer look.
Originally put forward by Homi Bhabha (p. 59), ‘cultural translation’ is a key
concept used in the book and deserves a little explanation. In Wang Ning’s
mind, unlike low-level linguistic rendition that seeks equivalence at word,
sentence and paragraph level, cultural translation refers to the higher level of
translation that seeks overall (con)textual equivalence allowing for a rearrange-
ment of paragraphs or structure without interfering with the content or
meaning of a text (p. 52). Translation in this sense is redefined as a revision
(p. 61), i.e. a dynamic rendering of the spirit and style of the source text (pp. 35,
50
52). Its aim is to put on the move ideas and theories and cast them back into
their wandering state (Said, 1983, 2000; quoted in this book on pp. 129
131,
198
199 and 278
279). Viewed in this way, this whole book is no doubt an
instance of cultural translation at work.
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On the basis of the above conception, Wang Ning’s biggest contribution

lies in his affinity with Bassnett and Lefevere in both his consistent self-
acknowledgement as a scholar of comparative literature and his orientation of
cultural studies to a translatological turn, a theoretically more rigorous thrust
(p. 13) on the basis of Bassnett’s translational turn in the same field in 1998 and
Bassnett and Lefevere’s cultural turn in translation studies in 1990.2
Corresponding to the many viewpoints in Polysystem theory, such as his
argument for cultural studies being ‘anti-institutional and critical’ (p. 10) (like
the marginality of translated literature in PS theory), Wang Ning’s second
contribution lies in his approaching those issues from the present-day macro
context of globalisation, another perspective that has an extremely high
currency and relevance to every one of us. Threading through a major part of
the book is the same argument moving from globalisation in the world to its
consequential demand of the emphasis of Chinese
English translation in
contemporary China’s academic circles (pp. 14
17, 26
29, 37
39, 58
75,
86
90, 110
121, 138
140, 148
153, 214, 279
281). This call for a shift of
emphasis is Wang Ning’s greatest contribution, though still a little early for
many Chinese scholars. It is its glocalising or decolonising function for the
reconstruction of China’s critical discourse (pp. 58
75) or modern literature
(pp. 66
71, 145
149) that defines Wang Ning’s pioneering role in this
advocacy.3
It is easy to see that in the framework of Wang Ning’s argument,
globalisation takes on the inverse sense of its usual version from the economic
context where the international power play considerably favours the stronger
countries, especially the English-speaking ones. Globalisation in that context
means monopolisation, a replay of the old-time colonisation of the weaker by
the stronger. But an economically powerful country is not necessarily a
culturally strong one. That is why this favour, once relocated in the present
context of literary and/or cultural studies, tends to dissolve and turn
 70 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

bidirectional. Here, the economically involuntary colonisation (either willingly

or unwillingly received) tends to give place to double voluntarism: voluntary
decolonisation from the self’s side and voluntary colonisation from the other’s
side, as is readily evidenced in Wang Ning’s theoretical emphasis on
translation out of the mother tongue in today’s China, that is, Chinese
English
English translation. We might as well say that this double voluntarism is
equally applicable to translation into the mother tongue in China as well as in
the world, in which case what prevails is voluntary decolonisation from the
other’s side and voluntary colonisation from the self’s side. That is where
hybridisation comes into play, a new theme that is now fast colonising its own
terrain in cultural and translation studies of today.
In face of the ever-increasing spread of global chaos and confusion, we
could see that it is this voluntarism that brings real hope to the possibility of a
peaceful coexistence of different cultures, races, ethnic groups and nations.
No translation, no humanity. This has always been the case throughout human
history. And now pinned down specifically for the present world, hybridisa-
tion, as the core of translation, has to be voluntarily emphasised for every
instance of translation in every situation. Of course, the equilibrium for
hybridisation is difficult to find and maintain, but its direction or inclination
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(leaning toward one language or side in translation) has to be tailored to a

specific local situation, spatially and temporally demarcated.
Indeed the uniqueness of Wang Ning’s sense of globalisation lies exactly in
its localisation in the Chinese context, where globalisation is for him both
the means and the end, used interchangeably with and defined innovatively
by decolonisation and glocalisation. It is this strong sense of locality in him
that makes up yet another contribution to cultural and translation studies
worldwide.

doi: 10.2167/pst006b.0 Xiangjun Liu

Fudan University and Shanghai University of Finance & Economics,
China

Notes
1. This immaturity is a deep-rooted problem of cultural studies and is duly admitted
by many scholars in the field. Wang Ning, though readily admitting the flaw, tends
to view it positively by partially crediting to it the prosperity of the whole field
(pp. 23, 238, 271). This positive spirit is an important prop for his dialectic
argument on globalisation, a source of not only challenges or conflicts but also
opportunities for dialogues (pp. 20
22, 38
39, 65, 77
78, 110
121, 141, 148
153,
203
207, 211
214, 220
236, 270).
2. It must be pointed out that, despite the affinity between Wang Ning’s translato-
logical turn and Bassnett’s translational turn in the same field of cultural studies,
we can find obvious difference between the two. While Wang Ning tends to
at
least for the time being
include translation studies in cultural studies, viewing
the former as a category under media studies, which in turn constitute a key part of
the latter in the context of globalisation (pp. 22
23), Susan Bassnett is more
inclined to call for a translational turn in cultural studies from the perspective
of the ‘meeting’ (Bassnett, 2001: 132) of, or the ‘overlap’ (Bassnett, 2001: 136)/
’cooperation’ (Bassnett, 2001: 138) between translation studies and cultural studies.
In other words, what Bassnett looks at is the common ground between cultural and
 Book Reviews 71

translation studies as two different and parallel fields. Yet this turn or common
ground metamorphoses itself in Edwin Gentzler’s interpretation into a joint, a
virtual merge of the two fields (Gentzler, 2001: xx). This ‘ambitious’ turn, whether
or not originally intended by Bassnett, is clearly very different from Wang Ning’s
turn.
3. Wang Ning is not alone in this pursuit. Similar significant calls come from two
other pioneers, Lu Gusun from Fudan University and Pan Wenguo from East
China Normal University, though each approaches the issue from a different
perspective. Viewed sociologically, Lu Gusun’s claim for the shift of emphasis is
made mainly from the rationalist perspective, aiming directly at the huge mass of
Chinese learners of English, while Pan Wenguo’s is mainly for the legitimacy of
this exodoric thrust in the spread to the world of classical Chinese works. These
three strains of thought deserve a parallel systematic study, which is however
beyond the scope of the present book review.

References
Bassnett, S. (2001) The translation turn in cultural studies. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere
(eds) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (pp. 123
140) (Reprinted
from the edition of 1998 by Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.). Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Gentzler, E. (2001) Foreword. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures:
Essays on Literary Translation (pp. ix
xxii) (Reprinted from the edition of 1998 by
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Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.). Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language

Education Press.
Wang, N. (2004) Globalization and Cultural Translation. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish
International.