Translating

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28268, 4 May 1957, Page 3

Translating

The Art of Translation. By Theodore H. savory. Cape. 159 pp. Index. ; This book will be of great practical interest to teachers and > students of Classics and Modern Languges. The author, a zoolo- ' gist, is known to readers outside ’ his own special field of arachno- ’ logy for his books on the language of science. He now advances 1 further into the linguistic field and, as before, manages to com1 bine the advantages of a fresh ! outlook with an enviably wide - knowledge* of language studies. ; The subject is approached with f a scientist’s orderliness. Types of translation are analysed accord- ’ ing to the nature of the material , to be translated and the kind of - reader for whom the translation . is designed. Scientific and completely factual material raises less ’ problems than literary works, especially poetry. > Some of the special topics treated are translating the classics, translation of modern languages ’ (French and German in some detail), the history of translation and translation of the Bible. ■ Translation from Russian, which has had so notable a place in the development of contemporary English literature, is not discussed, nor are the special problems arising with oloer languages other than Greek and Latin, such as Old English. But no one person perhaps can be expected to speak with authority in all these fields, even if he did not study spiders as well, and the writer is ' wise to keep to what he knows. - While all chapters in this book • will interest teachers, one dis- • cusses in particular the place of 1 translation in education. The 1 writer, we feel sure, has had ] experience in language teaching as well as science teaching; many of his observations show < the practical common sense that < comes of experienced His plea ; for a course of general linguistics j merits thought, and perhaps a . little development. Some basic I assumptions, however, remain 1 unexamined in his appraisal of < the value of language study. He acknowledges that translation c from modern languages may be t as valuable a mental discipline a as translation from the classics, 1 without discussing the fact that } the whole concept of language (■ teaching as mental discipline has r been under attack. A defence of the concept, coming from a scientist, would have been interesting and valuable It is in a « failure to penetrate to such basic g questions, not in any shortcomings f inaccuracy or practical usefulness ’C that the work is that of a brilliant p amateur rather than of al s specialist in language study. There is a useful bibliography of books and papers on the theory c of translation. The index is 9 somewhat inexpert, including a p number of irrelevant entries. For 2 example an observation that c scientific words often have exhet S equivalents in another language H illustrated by the example that ‘‘Sauerstofi” is always translated “oxygen” does not require an , entry “Sauerstofi” in the index. t]