Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

METHOD OR MAESTRI: TWO APPROACHES TO (TEACHING)TRANSLATIONBy Gregory ContiS. Hervey, I. Higgins, S. Cragie, P. Gambarotta, ThinkingItalian Translation: A Course in Translation Method:Italian to English. London, Routledge, 2000.R. Zacchi, M. Morini, eds, Manuale di traduzioni dall’inglese.Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2002.These two books start by asking the same questionand then go on to answer it in ways that seem diametricallyopposed. “Can translation be taught?” ask themostly British authors of Thinking Italian Translation,and they have no doubt that the answer is yes: “anyonewho has taught the subject knows that a structuredcourse will help most students to become significantlybetter at translation …. This book offers just such acourse.” “With the demise of all prescriptive illusions,”respond the Italian editors of the other volume, “the editorsof manuals and didactic texts for translators candeclare themselves definitively free from the necessity ofadding a ‘scientific’ patina to their descriptions or frommaking their suggestions systematic… And this becausetranslation, as von Clausewitz said of war, cannot betaught but can only be shown by examples.”Were it not politically incorrect, a reader might considerthese two statements as solid evidence for the continuingvalidity of cultural stereotypes: the British, backsstraight in their pressed khaki uniforms, whistling in unison,rigorously building the bridge over the river Kwai;the Italians, draped in the multi-colored garb ofRaphael’s “The School of Athens,” each staring off in adifferent direction. But as is often the case with oppositionalapproaches, here too they have more in commonthan appears at first glance, and they end up arriving injust about the same place. What is truly interesting forthe outside observer is what happens along the way.As indicated by the ing participle in the title,Thinking Italian Translation aims both to indicate aprocess and to describe a product. The objective here isto train translators in a method that will guide them inmaking self-conscious, well-reasoned choices amongfully analyzed alternatives on the way to creating a unifiedand coherent final product. The presentation isorganized progressively and moves from consideration offour underlying issues — translation as process, translationas product, cultural transposition, and compensation— to examination of the formal properties of texts,semantics and pragmatics, varieties of language, andvarieties of genre. Finally, the authors complement thisprogressive elaboration of their method with four chapterson topics in “contrastive linguistics,” highlightingdifferences between English and Italian (nominalization,determiners, adverbials, condition, and future in thepast).At each stage in their presentation, the authorsarrange the material in an ascending spiral, moving progressivelyfrom the most specific to the most general orfrom the narrowest to the broadest view. The three chapterson the formal properties of texts, for example, beginwith phonic/graphic and prosodic issues, move intogrammatical and sentential questions, and end with discourseand intertextual analysis. Similarly, semanticquestions are examined first with regard to literal andthen connotative meaning, which is in turn broken downinto various subcategories: attitudinal, associative, allusive,reflected, collocative, and affective. Each chapterincludes one or more practical exercises, which are givenmore in-depth treatment and discussion in a companionvolume, the Tutor’s Handbook. The main volume’s treatmentof genre issues concludes with three chapters dedicatedto scientific and technical texts, legal and businessdocuments, and consumer-oriented texts. Literary translationis not given specific treatment, but literary textsare used throughout the book as examples and practicalexercises.Although detailed and extremely analytical in itspresentation, Thinking Italian Translation’s most valuablecontribution as a teaching/learning tool is its succinctstatement of the two fundamental bases of themethod it proposes: (1) that the translation process consistsin the simultaneous interpretation of the source text(ST) and the formulation of a target text (TT); and (2)that this simultaneous process is initiated and driven bythe systematic asking and answering of questions: Whatis the purpose of the text? What are its salient formal,semantic, cultural, and stylistic features? How do thosefeatures serve the purpose? The emphasis on simultaneityis crucial because the constant confrontation of theST and various potential TTs motivates and sharpens theTranslation Review 53