REVIEWS
The reviews are ordered alphabetically according to the names of authors oreditors.
Branchadell, Albert & Lovell Margaret West (eds.). 2005.
Less Translated Languages
. Am-sterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vii + 416 pp. ISBN 90-272-1664-9 (Eur) & 1-58811-480-5 (US). Price: Euros: 130.00; $ 156.00.
Less Translated Languages
explores a topic largely overlooked. There is no entry “lesstranslated languages” in Mona Baker’s
Encyclopedia of Translation Studies
(1998), nor inMark Shuleworth and Moire Cowie’s
Dictionary of Translation Studies
(1997), and FangMengzhi’s
Dictionary of Translation Studies
(2004). “Less translated languages” refers to“all those languages that are less o�en the source of translation in the international ex-change of linguistic goods, regardless of the number of people using these languages”(1).This definition tells us that well-known and widely diffused languages such as Chineseand Arabic as well as long-neglected minority languages such as Catalan (in Spain) be-long to this category. By drawing aention to them, this collection draws aention inTranslation Studies to an area that needs to be further studied.The book is a selection of articles from the conference “Interculturality and Transla-tion: Less Translated Languages”, and emphasises languages such as Catalan, “a sig-nificant Western minority language that remains largely unresearched in mainstreamTranslation Studies” (1).The book is divided into thematic parts.‘English: The Dominant Language’, focuses on English and comprises five articles. Itis somewhat contradictory that the ‘most translated’ should be studied in this collection.The first article is Anthony Pym and Grzegorz Chrupala’s ‘The quantitative analysis oftranslation flows in the age of an international language’; it questions that the great dis-parity between what is translated into English (which is ‘less’) and what is translated outof it (which is ‘more’) is a sign of genuine cultural hegemony. By means of concrete data,they conclude that the key is the sheer size in the number of people speaking English.Vilelmini Sosonis’ ‘Multilingualism in Europe: Blessing or curse?’ explores the multilin-gualism of the European Union. The European Union has a policy of linguistic equality, but, nevertheless English and French are “more equal” than e.g. Finnish and Estonian.Hassan Hamzé’s contribution ‘An example of linguistic submission: The translation ofaffixes and Greco-Latin formants into Arabic’ is a plea against a systematic applicationof Arabic equivalents for French or English affixes which he considers as “linguistic sub-mission”. Nobel Perdu Honeyman’s ‘From Arabic to other languages through English’is based on his translation of the
Kitáb-I-Aqdas
into Spanish from English and using theArabic original as a means of control; he claims that in some cases, relay translation func-tions well. The last article in this part, Maria D. Oltra Ripoll’s ‘The translation of culturalreferences in the cinema’ claims that a screen translator (from English to Spanish) mustpay much aention to cultural references and she then analyses the techniques for trans-lating cultural references. This aspect of translation work poses great challenges to trans-lators, especially today with the trend toward globalization and cultural nationalism.There are five articles in the section dealing with ‘Minority languages: Facing inequal-ity in the translation arena’. The first three discuss aspects of “preliminary norms”, spe-cifically in “translation policy”. Oscar Diaz Fouces discusses three levels of languagepolicy in the European Union: the official languages of the member-states, the minoritylanguages such as Breton and Catalan, and the languages of immigrants. He puts for-ward proposals for translation policies that will improve the status of minority languag-es at the second and third levels. Marta García González addresses social factors thatdetermine the use of translation in specific minority-language communities of WesternEurope. Based on communicative situations requiring translation and on the social, cul-tural, and political conditions that have a bearing on the presence of translation activ-ity, she presents a descriptive model for determining translation out of and into theselanguages. Diaz Fouces and González both consider translation as a tool of resistance tocultural imposition, whereas Albert Branchadell’s ‘ Mandatory Translation’ examines anexample of translation imposed on minority language speakers, which is a study of thelinguistic rights of linguistic minorities. Although it violates what he terms “linguistic se-curity”, that is the right of individuals to carry out their activities in their own language,Branchadell finds that, under special circumstances, Catalan speakers have to translatethe explanation for their acts into the national language, Spanish. Eva Espasa’s ‘Theatreand translation: Unequal exchange in a supermarket of cultures’ probes inequality re-
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