Summary of Jeremy Munday's "Issues in Translation Studies"

By Shaimaa Suleiman An introduction to The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, Munday's chapter, "Issues in Translation Studies", briefly explores major theoretical attempts as well as recent theoretical developments in the field of translation studies. In the first section, Munday gives the reader an account of early translation theory, which was primarily motivated by the practice of translation. Most of these early writings, Munday explains, were chiefly concerned with justifying the translator's choices and discussing the strategies that were used to address certain translation problems. Outstanding examples of such writings include the works of Cicero, the Roman rhetorician and orator, and those of St. Jerome, the Bible translator. Cicero's seminal essay entitled "De optimo genere oratrum", while not nearly as theoretically developed as contemporary translation theory, remains notably relevant. In fact, his distinction between the 'interpreter' and the 'orator' is believed to have initiated the word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense debate. Moreover, Nida's distinction between formal and dynamic equivalence is also believed to have been partially inspired by Cicero's ideas. Another phenomenon giving rise to early developments in the field of translation theory is the translation of the Bible, which gradually brought to light the distinctive and sensitive nature of religious texts, thus encouraging theoretical inquiry into the concept of fidelity in translation. Consequently, several versions of the Bible appeared that displayed varying degrees of fidelity and faithfulness to the ST. With fidelity at stake, St. Jerome was asked to introduce a standard version of the Bible to end this polarization. Like Cicero, St. Jerome produced an influential statement that explained his strategy in translation. The second section attempts to trace the rise of translation studies as a valid discipline. Translation studies, Munday goes on to explain, is a nascent discipline that emerged out of diverse disciplines such as language and literature in the second half of the 20th century. The designation "translation studies", however, is not as old as the field. In fact, before that designation was coined by Holmes, the elusive nature of translation as art, craft and even science informed various variations of the field's name such as translatology and translation science. This lack of consensus over the name of the field, according to Holmes, is indicative of how the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies has resulted in a general lack of definition, scope and focus of the field. Munday, however, contends in the third section, which he dedicates to defining translation, that it is the slippery nature of translation that makes any

attempt at defining translation studies seem futile or incomplete. For instance, Roman Jakobson's taxonomy of translation into intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic may seem at once comprehensive. However, the taxonomy proves restrictive when closely examined since it ignores possible overlaps between its components. The same is true of Munday's own definition of translation which, although it comprises the cultural, linguistic, ideological and social aspects of translation as a process and a product, does not set the limits of translation. Arriving at a definition of translation is, moreover, made all the more complicated by the question of 'derivative' (literal) vs. 'creative' (free) translation. Another problematic aspect of defining translation is the distinction made between written translation and interpretation which, at some point, unjustly renders each of them as autonomous. The fourth section of the chapter is Munday's answer to the second point that Holmes raised regarding the scope of translation studies. Munday maintains that, decades after Holmes, the scope of translation studies has significantly changed to the point where the possibility of a universal theory of translation simply stopped being foreseeable. With that in mind, it was important for translation theory to extend to new horizons beyond the discussion of lexical equivalence and start to incorporate other elements such as context, participants and culture. That is precisely what models and theories such as those of Newmark, Venuti, Vinay and Darbelnet, Nida and others have achieved. In the fifth section, Munday tackles the rise of cultural studies in the field of translation on the hands of Bassnett, Lefevere and Snell-Hornby during the 1980s and 1990s. This trend has reinvigorated and broadened the scope of translation studies with works on ideology, poetics and patronage and on translation as 'rewriting'; postcolonial and feminist translation theory; ethics and identity formation; and more. This then-emerging theoretical endeavor has had far-fetched implications: it has inspired skepticism about such deeply established notions of translation as ST-TT equivalence and TL naturalness, and shifted attention to the sociology of translation, which is more translator-oriented. It is argued, nonetheless, that incorporating cultural studies into the field of translation studies is likely to incur further fragmentation in the latter, to which Munday replies that the two fields are indeed able to bridge their differences and reach a common interest. Besides outlining the chapters of the book, the sixth section acts as a brief overview of the various approaches to translation. Accordingly, Chapter 2 sets out to explore the key elements of linguistic and communicative translation theories. The chapter is written by Newmark who stresses that translation theory should be useful and practical. In Chapter 3, Basil Hatim addresses Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer's theory of text type and skopos. The fourth chapter

tackles the processes of translation and interpretation from a cognitive point of view that draws on the models of cognitive linguistics and contributes to the findings of cognitive science. In Chapter 5, David Kattan explains translation as 'intercultural communication' with special reference to the linguistic concept of 'context of situation'. This chapter, thus, serves as a continuation of the previous linguistics-oriented chapters, and as a prelude to the upcoming culture-oriented ones. Chapter 6, written by Theo Hermans, explores the implications of the everincreasing contextualization of translation/interpretation since the 1980s, and how this the ideological and ethical motivations of translators have, as a result, affected their choices in translation. Herman also focuses on postcolonial definitions of translation that intend to challenge the existing western definitions and commonplaces. Chapter 7 deals with translation technology which has introduced machine translation, corpus linguistics, terminology and controlled language, and translation memory system. Moreover, Chapter 8 is dedicated to interpretation studies in relation to translation studies. The ninth and last chapter of the book explores issues, problems and strategies of audiovisual translation. In the last section of the chapter, Munday explores the challenge Theo Herman's and Maria Tymoczko's raise to the perceptions of translation. The two theorists agree, and Munday concurs, that translation is an intercultural phenomenon that must incorporate, especially when it comes to definition, both western and eastern perspectives without discrimination. The future of the discipline of translation studies, Munday concludes, rests upon the recognition of and openness to all points of views.