Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine
This volume contains twelve papers from a conference on 12-14 January 2006 at University College Ghent under the auspices of the Belgian Linguistic Society.
In ‘Introduction’ (1–10), Willy Vandeweghe, Sonia Vandepitte, and Marc Van de Velde sketch the contribution of linguistics to the development of Western translation studies (e.g. machine translation, corpus studies, text linguistics). They also state the objectives and main ideas of this collection—shaping the corpus approach in translation research.
Within the framework of this corpus-based research in translation studies, Mona Baker (11–21) analyzes the use of idioms in English texts. Explicitation, simplification, normalization, and standardization in the translation of idioms are studied on the basis of the Translation English Corpus and the British National Corpus. Sara Laviosa (123–36) puts forward a corpus-based methodology for the study of anglicisms in business discourse and focuses on the lemma business in Italian. The study by Josep Marco and Josep Guzman (155–70) investigates how five verbs that frequently occur in English fiction denoting bodily expression (i.e. frown, gasp, shrug, sniff, and stare) are rendered into Catalan.
Anna Espunya (67–86) discusses whether the pragmatic-cognitive principles of informativeness, claimed to influence explicitness in monolingual discourse, plays a role in translational explicitation as well. Her report focuses on the use of connectives in rendering complex sentences in English-to-Catalan translation. Patrick Goethals (87–103) explores how parallel corpus research can generate hypotheses that are relevant to contrastive linguistics, translation studies and text linguistics. The data suggest a contrastive difference between demonstrative and non-demonstrative definite determiners in Spanish and Dutch.
Sandra L. Halverson (105–21) studies translation shifts from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and links the shifts posited in translation research to a construal operation. Marjatta Lehtinen (137–54) compares the relationship between clause structures and the construal of subjectivity in English and Finnish.
Andrew Chesterman (53–66) discusses similarity analysis, which entails both sameness and difference in the linguistic form of a translation. Similarity is perceived through its nature as a multi-place predicate and the difference between divergence and convergence. Kris Buyse (23–36) presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the prosodic and pragmatic features of clitic pronouns in French-to-Spanish translation. This can contribute to improving the translation competence of native and non-native translators.
Christiane Nord’s article (171–84) suggests a methodology for comparing intercultural speech acts with reference to a corpus of English, German, Spanish, and French university manuals and textbooks. The paper by Jana Chamonikolasová and Jiří Rambousek (37–52) is dedicated to the use of diminutive expressions in English and Czech original texts and their translations. The study confirms the very frequent occurrence of diminutives in Czech compared to English.
The volume closes with Sonia Vandepitte’s meaning description model (185–200), which starts from Paul H. Portner’s concept of formal semantics (What is meaning? Fundamentals of formal semantics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and includes the propositional content of the message with its truth conditions.