http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2653-8944University of Malta, e-mail: joseph.eynaud@um.edu.mt http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2653-8944
Translator training has been, for many decades, the focus of interest of academic institutions, business organizations, government agencies, and international organizations. This interest is pertinent to the ever growing role of translation in all walks of life. Various types of academic and professional translator training programmes and courses are offered by universities and translation agencies throughout the world using various types of training materials for different purposes and levels. These training materials include translation course books designed and/or written by academics and professionals.
Domenica Minniti Gonias’s La traduzione: Storia – Teoria – Pratica (Athens 2018) fits in perfectly as an academic and professional training textbook for academics, trainers, translators and students. As the author states in her Preface translation in recent decades is experiencing a phase of renewed interest. Recent trends in studies on intercultural communication, ethnology and psycholinguistics on transcoding processes explain the increase in interest in this discipline. Moreover, translation, as a practice, is made ever more necessary by the intensification of international trade and the profound geopolitical changes of our time.
This volume consists of four chapters and a highly useful appendix whereby it considers translation studies according to traditional specifications. In such a context dealing with theory and practice of translation, the volume intends to make an overall contribution: on the one hand the interdisciplinary studies between translation studies, linguistics and language teaching, on the other contrastive linguistics which studies the relations between Italian and Greek. Therefore, the reader is not limited to a descriptive approach since particular attention is given to language teaching and to translation issues applied to the language pair Italian-Greek.
The first chapter is a brief historical profile of translation theories and addresses a methodological question: the history of translation or the history of translation science, that is, the history of translation studies? The author is in this volume more inclined to the second approach as history of translation consists first of all in the history of ideas elaborated in contexts set by translators themselves. The second chapter is a very helpful Translation Practice manual while the first and third chapters are more theoretical dealing with Lexicography, Contrastive Linguistics, Translation for Specific Purposes and Terminology. The fourth chapter is on lexicon while the Appendix presents texts extrapolated from various manuals and accompanied by a short comment.
The first chapter therefore reflects a methodological choice, albeit with the necessary concessions to the opposite current. The ideas examined from antiquity to today are therefore divided in the so called the pre-scientific period and the scientific period. The common thread that links the various ideas and positions formulated over two thousand years is about fidelity or unfaithfulness of translation and translatability or untranslatability, based on the discussions of intellectuals of the past and of various schools of translation studies. In choosing the authors to be examined the author broadens the range, including Italian philosophers, linguists and writers, such as Dante, Berchet, Croce, who traditionally are not included in the international translation bibliography. As absurd as it may seem, even Umberto Eco does not appear in many translation histories, despite the fact that he is a fully fledged authority of the discipline and has been translated into many languages, confirming the fact that the history of culture is unfortunately governed by the logic of centralism and monolingualism.
The question of translatability is taken up again in the second chapter, but more properly placed in the interpretative framework of interlinguistic communication and discussed in a clearly contrasting key in relation to the Italian-Greek translation pair. Moreover, and it could not be otherwise, translation is understood as one of the aspects of language learning and therefore carrying communicative competence. In this sense, analysis of interferences is not proposed as an end in itself, in a theoretical function, but in order to enable the learner to grasp the dynamism of correspondences between one language and another, which represents the essence of the translation act. To this end, the chapter also contains a part dedicated to literary translation having as a point of observation contrastive linguistics at phonosymbolic, morphosyntactic, lexical, semantical, cultural and pragmatic-communicative levels on which translators must conduct their work in search for dynamic equivalences. Finally, indications are provided on methodological aspects that are in a sense more technical, such as the transliteration of names and various operations that can be performed on a text to be translated from Italian into Greek and vice versa.
The third chapter, dedicated to specialized translation, is placed in a definitely professional perspective. The tasks of the executor of the translation of a text written in a special language are discussed and in particular the structural and functional characteristics of a text of a gastronomic, artistic, legal-administrative and technical nature are analysed. Finally, the chapter contains ample examples of translating specialised texts.
In the fourth and last chapter general lexicographical information is provided, besides useful guidelines on the characteristics of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and their use when translating a text. With the same purpose, in the appendix with which the book ends, specific themes related to translation studies are examined. Besides model essay texts are reproduced in original and in translation with the accompanying explanatory function by the author.
Domenica Minniti Gonias’s book is clearly indicative of the audience to which it is addressed namely academics, trainers, translators and students. This book as the author writes has the fortune and the privilege of being the first in a series of scientific manuals published at the Editions of the National University and Kapodistrias of Athens (Εκδόσεις του Εθνικού και Καποδιστριακού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών).
