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Eusebio Vicente Llcer Llorca 2004: Sobre la traduccin: ideas tradicionales y teorascontemporneas. Valencia: Universitat de Valncia. 216 pp.

Javier Franco AixelUniversidad de AlicanteJavier.Franco@ua.es

Any contribution aiming at a better understanding of the astounding development ofTranslation Studies in the second half of the twentieth century must clearly be welcomeat a time when translation is still considered at many universities as if it were some sort ofancillary and mainly practical skill. Indeed, the creation of a score of BAs in translation inSpain over the last fifteen years or so bears witness to the interest in what can only be

termed as a new discipline in Spanish-speaking countries, and the need to obtain toolsenabling our students to gain a general overview of the field. This is even more so if weconsider the very strong leaning our translation degrees show towards the practical andprofessional sides, most likely in part at least as a reaction against the academicism whichhas traditionally reigned over the philological degrees, which is where the majority oftranslation teachers began their academic career, since there were no full translation BAsin Spain until the 90s.

This interest in the new field and the need to write new handbooks avoiding traditionalprescriptivism, the role of translation as a tool in foreign language teaching, or the merelylinguistic perspective, can be seen in many Spanish handbooks linking the historical,theoretical, didactic and professional domains of translation which have been publishedin the last 15 years (Rabadn 1991; lvarez 1991; Pea and Hernndez, 1994; Torre 1994;Valero 1995; Lpez and Wilkinson 1997; Daz 1999; Hurtado 2001; Yllera and Ozaeta 2002;Rabadn and Fernndez 2003; Moya 2003; to quote just a few of the more generaloverviews of the theory and history of translation that can be accessed alongside about ahundred Spanish specialised handbooks of all sorts on translation and interpretingpublished in this same period). New or not so new schools and approaches more or lessderived from the cultural turn and more or less functionalist in their scope, such aspolysystems or the manipulation school, the skopos theory; cognitivism applied totranslation; social constructivism in translation teaching; relevance theory as the lastattempt of linguistics to maintain its influence on the field; postmodernism with itschallenging branches of postcolonialism or gender studies, are models our students mustbe familiar with, if only in order for them to gain awareness of the nature of translation.Only with this kind of conceptual tools will they be able to rule out mechanical behaviourin translation, endeavouring to avoid the traditional because it sounds better rationale

which has typically been the only, and indeed poor, argument used by translators whenjustifying their choices. After thirty years of translation studies as an autonomousdiscipline, the least we can expect from our BAs in translation as opposed to their formerself-taught counterparts is the ability to explain the causality of their translation decisionsin a coherent way.

In this connection, Llcers book is an ambitious attempt to cover the whole of moderntranslation studies in the twentieth century, and to do so from the angle of a generalhandbook for beginners (it should even be understood by keen high-school students,according to the author). This book is divided into three major chapters, the first De laprescripcin a la descripcin: ideas y tendencias. 19501980 [From Prescription to

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Description: Ideas and Trends, 19501980] covering the linguistics period; the second,Temas y teoras actuales (19802000) [Current Subjects and Theories, 19802000]aimed at presenting the last years of the 20th century, which is when translation studiesbecame the autonomous discipline it is now; and a third and shorter one Qu es latraduccin y hacia dnde vamos en su estudio terico, descriptivo y aplicado? [What IsTranslation and Where Are We Heading in Its Theoretical, Descriptive, and AppliedStudies?], which is mainly made up of conclusions. All of them include short sectionsbearing some very attractive titles, such as Qu ocurre en un choque de culturas?:equivalencia e interculturalidad [What Happens in a Culture Clash?: Equivalence andMulticulturality], which is a token of how this author has tried to make his book asappealing as possible.

There is little to be said against this structure, except that this kind of rigid timedivisions disguise the fact that ideas are not usually born at a given moment, coincidingwith the beginning of decades, but are derived from long developments. For instance, thereare milestones in the 19th century (the contributions made by Humboldt orSchleiermacher to mention two of the most important ones) without which it would bedifficult to understand the state of the art. It is true that they are mentioned in this book,although, strangely enough, in a chapter dealing with structuralism, when a specific sectionfocusing on the historical background might have been much clearer. However, it is alsotrue that the didactic function of the book seems to require this kind of simplification inorder to provide as clear a picture as possible for the students it is addressed to.

Nevertheless, there is one issue in which this kind of book (indeed, any scholarly book,but especially those attempting to establish a sound background for our students) shouldact with extreme care, and that is the way sources are treated. University lecturers arealways complainingand rightly at thatof the sloppiness with which formal issues aredealt with by our students. It seems increasingly difficult to convince even postgraduatestudents, for instance, that quoting classical authors as if their works were recent onlybrings about confusion and, therefore, reflects the students grasp of the field as tainted bythis same confusion. Unfortunately, this kind of fault seems to be only too apparent in thisbook, whose main aim is precisely to explain with maximum transparency the foundationsof current translation studies. We find works cited in the text whose bibliographicalreference is not included (e.g. Intravaia and Escavee on page 36; or Toury 1986 on page149), confusing years for foundational works (Cicero 1989; Benjamin 1955; Borges 1971);works repeated with different references (e.g. Ivirs Formal Correspondence appearstwice in a row with apparently different origins); different quoting systems (e.g. Doyleschapter on Kerrigan is quoted as part of a title, so that it is impossible to find the book in

the bibliography, whereas Enkvists chapter on contrastive text linguistics appears as takenfrom the editors, and, by the way, the year is wrong here too); there are quotations basedon translated versions whose bibliographical references are provided in the originallanguage (e.g. curiously enough, Ortega y Gasset seems to have been read by the author inan English translation on page 113 but the reference is to the Spanish original in thebibliography); footnotes do not always appear to be obviously related with the text or ideathey allegedly expand on (e.g. number 59 on page 55). There are also a few more misprints,interferences and stylistic mistakes than should be expected in what is a revised version ofa previous book, adding to the general feeling that the book could have benefited from amore careful revision. Also, one of the main functions of this kind of handbook is that it

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should be intended for consultation. In order to meet this aim, it is very important toinclude subject and author indexes, which are especially useful when students try to gleaninformation on authors, schools or the (sometimes very confusing) terminology of ourinterdiscipline. This way the book would be much more useful. All these formaldeficiencies are especially regrettable since they should be very easy to solve andunfortunately affect the strengths of the work in a negative way: even more so if weconsider that this book is a revised and expanded version of a previous volume (Llcer1997), so the author might have taken the opportunity of putting formal matters right.

With regard to the contents of the book, the attempt of comprising so much in twohundred pages is praiseworthy and has been at least partly achieved. It must be said thatcomplete success would have meant identifying a core for each of the issues dealt with, and

Llcer generally achieves this aim by building his sections around central issues intranslation studies. Nevertheless, now and then the amount and weightiness of theinformation to be conveyed is so huge that one feels faced with a series of more or lesslinked quotations from different authors, so that the resulting denseness seems to hamperthe authors declared intention of making the book readable even for high-school students.

In this kind of general handbook, it is also very usualif not inevitableto findcategorical statements which would no doubt be qualified if the addressees were a bitmore scholarly, as the author himself declares on more than one occasion. Thus, it wouldbe hard to back up assertions such as that the existence of language universals across alllanguages has been proved even though they appear to be of little or no use for translationtheory because we know that they exist but we do not know what they consist of (26), orthat Spanish written and oral usages are very close because there are hardly any sociolectsdifferent from the standard variety (55); or that technical translations are characterisedby the fact that they do not need to last for a long time, and that, given the fact that theyhave no connotations, this kind of text is easily translated by machines (146)obviously,if this was the case, we would not be teaching technical and scientific translation at ouruniversities.

On the other hand, the treatment of the different schools seems to be quite detailedeven if a bit scattered throughout the text, and the inclusion of important schools such aspolysystems, skopos or relevance theory shows that the author has read extensively. Onemisses a fuller treatment of postmodernist approaches in order to obtain a completepicture of the state of the art, given the weight deconstructionist, postcolonial and feministapproaches seem to carry nowadays, mainly in the United States and Canada. All the same,it is also true that the focus of the author is clearly on descriptivism, and it may be arguedthat a review of these approacheswhich are characterised by their philosophical

densenesswould make the resulting book rather too complex for its declared function.Generally speaking, the small size of the book and its ambitious scope hampers clarity.

Obviously, it is difficult to sum up Tourys approach (1980, 1995) in a couple of pages(4951), but it seems illogical to put Rabadn (1991) and Toury on opposite sides of thefence or to say (51) that Rabadn states that the latter does not give its due value toreception, when the whole of Tourys revolution in Translation Studies is focused on hisinsistence on analysing translations from the perspective of the receiving pole. In thisconnection, indeed, both Toury and Rabadn are opposed to traditional prescriptivism,whose only aim was to check if the translator had been able to square the circle byproviding the same text in another language, instead of trying, as Toury and Rabadn

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demand, to discover what the translator had really tried to do, something which can onlybe done by placing the reception context in the centre of the explanation.

This yearning for clarity seems to be behind one of the most original parts of the book,in the section Si todo fuera ms sencillo de lo que parece. . . [If Everything Was Simplerthan It Appears . . .], where Llcer once again portrays Toury as opposed to functionalismby saying that real functionalists believe that translation begins with the source text. In thischapter, the author attempts to solve the main problems of the theory of translationthrough a combination of skopos and relevance theories, although admittedly the latterrejects the need for a translation theory, which is the main aim of the skopos approach.

The book ends with a useful list of definitions of translation in the second half of thetwentieth century, although regrettably it does not include many of the more modern

attempts, especially the sociological stance defended by Hermans (1985), according towhich translation will be anything considered as translation by a given society or group (afull confession of the impossibility of fixing an axiomatic and ahistorical definition oftranslation). Wisely enough, the author takes no sides, but puts forward some charac-teristics a definition of translation should take into accountbasically, everything, whichis most likely the reason why we have no generally accepted definition of translation. Butthen, the situation does not differ greatly from the one reached by other fields, such asliterature, where scholars seem to have given up the attempt at a conclusive definition andseem content with a sociological approach to start with, and with working definitions thatmay change depending on the aims of each piece of research.

The last paragraph is a statement of the complexity of translation studies, wheredogmatisms are doomed to failure. I can only agree with Llcer in this. As the authorexplains, we are indeed still rather far from a theory of translation enabling us tounderstand the deepest secrets of this activity. With all our lacunae in substantive issues,such as everything related to the process or to the translators black box, and with theshortage of historical long-range field studies, there is a long way to go and we should keepon working, with descriptive studies at the forefront in order to obtain meaningful dataand at least partial pictures to be processed and integrated by a more and more inclusivetranslation theory. After all, we have been trying to apply a scientific and/or systematicapproach to translation for only the last fifty years or so, thirty if we only includeindependent translation studies in the picture. Perhaps we should be more patient and notexpect to understand everything (in the unlikely case that this were possible) in onegeneration.

On the whole, this book reflects the praiseworthy efforts of its author in order toprovide translation students with a tool where they can find an annotated summary of part

of the most influential translation theories of the last fifty years or so. These new schoolshave made up a great part of the rich and varied domain of what we nowadays calltranslation studies. Trying to put into words such a turmoil as the one experienced bytranslation studies in the last decades is not an easy task, and attempts of this kind nodoubt help to achieve a much needed clarification.

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Works Cited

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Ed. Theo Hermans. London: Croom Helm. 715.Hurtado Albir, Amparo 2001: Traduccin y traductologa. Madrid: Ctedra.Llcer Llorca, Eusebio V. 1997: Introduccin a los estudios de traduccin. Valencia: Universitat de

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teora y prctica. Barcelona: Gedisa.Moya Jimnez, Virgilio 2003: La selva de la traduccin: teoras traductolgicas contemporneas.

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Torre Serrano, Esteban 1994: Teora de la traduccin literaria. Madrid: Sntesis.Toury, Gideon 1980: In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics

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