Thinking French Translation: A Course in Translation Method. French to English by Ian Higgins (review)

Abstract

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 227 between French sounds and their English counterparts. Filling a pressing need for a good accessible guide in English to the phonetics of French, this impressive volume is a very welcome contribution. University of Kent David Hornsby Thinking French Translation: A Course in Translation Method. French to English. By Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge. 2002. xvi + 287pp. ?65 (pbk ?18.99). ISBN 0-415-25521-x(pbk 0-415-2552-8). The first(1992) edition of Thinking French Translation was called Thinking Trans? lation, with 'French' in the subtitle, and the modified title reflects the success ofthe original format, which is now applied to other languages too. The book's structure seems clearer in the second edition, partly as a result ofthe streamlining of the first edition's two chapters on genre into one. The firstfive chapters, grouped in an 'Introduction' section, look at the issues of theory and method surrounding the text proper: translation as process and product, translation procedures fromliteral to free,cultural issues, compensation and loss (now accorded a separate chapter), and text types. Then the section called 'The Formal Properties of Texts' has three chapters on linguistic units, in ascending order from sounds up to the text level, followed by chapters on conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, and language variation. The second edition has reversed the 'top-down' ap? proach ofthe first.Recent pragmatic and cognitive approaches to translation take the view that the reading, understanding, and production of language are not bottom-up processes that start from the smallest units (morphemes, words, sentences) and end with the largest (larger text units, the text itself), but rather top-down processes that take these latter elements into consideration first. The preface acknowledges this, but points out that students generally find the bottom-up approach more intuitive. Within this section too there are chapters on specialized translation (scientific, legal, consumer-oriented) and finallya chapter on stylistic editing. The third section, on 'Contrastive Topics and Practicals', looks at the well-known French-English difficultiesconcerning adverbials, prepositions, nominalization, and absolutes. This lattersection makes the structure a littleconvoluted, as these topics are situated on the grammatical level, while an earlier chapter deals with other translation issues in grammar. At the same time, the classic topics looked at in the last section loom very large in French-English translation, and so a separate treatment is defensible. Thinking French Translation has in French studies achieved generic status, having come to be referredto by its authors alone, along with but perhaps not quite up with ' Vinay and Darbelnet'. This revised edition should see to itthat 'Hervey and Higgins' remains one of the standard translation texts. University of Leeds Nigel Armstrong An Introduction to Twentieth-Century French Literature. By Victoria Best. London: Duckworth. 2002. 159 pp. ?I2-99- ISBN 07-156-3166-7. This book is, as its title says, an introduction. Its six main chapters deal with firstperson narrative, poetry, existentialist fiction,experiments in form,women's writing, and fiction since 1970. There is a marked preference for the novel over other genres. ...