This volume is a collection of chapters on research in translation studies and pragmatics that focuses on the translation of tourist literature. It contains chapters by well-established figures in translation studies as well as contributions by scholars at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), including three by the editors themselves.
Hatim argues that the macrocultural side of cultural expression (textual practices, discourses, and genres) has often been neglected by translation studies. He examines “the extent to which a translation is successful in preserving … the socio-textual practices involved” by analyzing a translation of a tourist guide in which, coincidentally, the translator shows an “extraordinary sensitivity … to cultural semiotics … and to text, discourse and genre requirements…” (p. 24).
Within the context of a functional-pragmatic model of translation evaluation, House reports on the results of the analysis of a corpus of translated and parallel texts designed to investigate if the impact of global English on lexis is also spreading to text construction. Whereas the bulk of the analyses do not confirm any influence of global English, she sees the potential for more hybrid texts in covert translation, which suggests the need for a redefinition of covert translation.
A third contribution that deals with textual conventions is Mason's. On the basis of a corpus of translated and original tourist brochures, the author reviews audience design and culture-specific textual practices and conventions in relation to directness and impersonal style versus reader involvement. He finds a significant amount of intercultural mediation in translation as well as the presence of features that are not conventional in the target language (TL).
To determine whether translators aim at perlocutionary equivalence, Hickey analyzes a corpus of Spanish tourist brochures and their translations. The results of the analysis indicate that most translators have semantic equivalence as their objective.
Lores' contribution examines patterns of thematic development in parallel and translated tourist brochures. Corpus analysis reveals hybrid patterns that do not correspond entirely to those of the source language or to those of the TL, neutralizing thematic development specifications.
Two chapters work explicitly within the framework of relevance theory. Murillo's chapter is an analysis of the translations into English of Spanish reformulation discourse markers. Translation choices were found to be related to the utterance interpretation process, register, and frequency of use. Taking as her point of departure the fact that translation is often a source of secondary communication situations (i.e., situations in which contextual assumptions used by the audience are not those intended by the communicator; Gutt, 2000), Navarro analyzes translations in which the process of identifying the right propositional form goes wrong, thus giving rise to miscommunication. Finally, Guillen applies Halliday's (1994) notion of grammatical metaphor to a translation corpus, finding few instances of it, yet concluding that the concept can still be a useful tool for grammatical description when textual, interlinguistic differences arise (p. 40).
In general, this volume offers some interesting material for researchers and students of SLA, although one might wish that the editors had done a better job of highlighting this in the introduction. Because a second language is usually involved in translating, either in the reading of the source or the writing of the target, the translation data presented have the potential to shed light on issues of acquisition and to suggest possible research questions. An example of this can be seen in the findings reported by several authors that indicate that translation results in hybridization or normalization of TL pragmatic and textual conventions (e.g., House, Mason, Lores), thus posing an interesting question regarding the extent to which hybridization is the result of translation-specific cognitive demands, language proficiency (at the textual and pragmatic level), translation education, professional norms, or a combination of these.
One striking weakness of this volume lies in the influence of linguistic structuralism and of structural equivalence (rather than functional, discoursal, or pragmatic equivalence) observed in some of the chapters. This is, of course, somewhat ironic in a volume on pragmatics. Such influence can be seen, for instance, in Guillen's chapter in connection with grammatical metaphor (changes in syntactic structure not imposed by TL grammar; e.g., clause → noun phrase). This notion is less pertinent when TL textual and pragmatic factors are considered as well, as in Navarro's chapter, in which many of the so-called instances of ambiguity are such only from a formal or structural point of view because the ambiguity is resolved at the textual level. In sum, despite some weaknesses, researchers and students of SLA will find valuable material in this book.
