Lynne Bowker (ed.) (2006). Lexicography, Terminology and Translation. Text-Based Studies in Honour of Ingrid
Meyer. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, pp. xii-252.
39.95 €. ISBN 0-7766-0627-1
This volume edited by Bowker is a tribute paid to Ingrid Meyer, a professor of the School of Translation and Interpretation of the University of Ottawa, who made an essential contribution to the language community in the fields of Lexicography, Terminology and Translation. The contributions in this volume are written by important scholars who were Prof. Meyer's colleagues or former students. The authors come from a variety of institutions around the world and, as Bowker points out in the Preface, they had the opportunity to work with Ingrid in some capacity and enjoyed meeting up with her at conferences or on research visits.
The papers in this volume have been grouped accordingly into three sections which are Meyer's three main fields of study: Lexicography, Terminology and Translation. As Bowker observes in the Introduction (p. 1), "a common theme runs through all the papers - that of being text-based studies".
Regarding the Lexicography section, the first chapter contains a paper by Francoeur who analyses the issue of meaning discrimination in the dictionary by Guy Miège (1677). She focuses on the semantic content of the dictionary that is very rich and innovative if compared with Miège's predecessors. The second chapter is written by Atkins and Bouillon and it also deals with the topic of semantic information in the compilation of a bilingual dictionary. More specifically, they focus on the various types of information that lexicographers use in the process of compiling a bilingual dictionary. The most interesting aspect of this paper is the concept of 'sense indicators' developed by the authors. The third chapter is written by Mackintosh who focuses on monolingual English and French dictionaries and analyses how social values affect the content of dictionaries, especially with regard to the macrostructure, the definitions and the examples. The author claims that dictionaries are ideological creations that reflect social values.
As for the Terminology section, the first paper by L'Homme and Marshman reviews the methods for discovering knowledge-rich contents (KRC) in electronic corpora that Meyer and her colleagues have explained in their papers. Barrièrre also discusses the notion of knowledge patterns and suggests using knowledge patterns as criteria for determining a text's knowledge-rich value. She also explains a software tool that she has developed which establishes the density of knowledge patterns in online documents. Her paper represents an interesting step for the creation of a terminological knowledge base (TKB). The next paper by Cabré describes the evolution of electronic linguistic resources aimed mainly at translators. She mainly focuses on text banks and knowledge databases, such as the Genome Project developed by the Institute of Applied Linguistics (IULA). The final paper in this second section presents the results of a terminometric study verifying the validity of some of the factors suggested as having an influence on term implantation in Quebec. More specifically, Quirion and Lanthier discuss the terminological factors concerning the intrinsic characteristics of terms that have an influence on term implantation in the fields of transportation and pension and retirement plans. Their study yields interesting conclusions regarding the characteristics of fully implanted terms.
Finally, the third section of the book is concerned with many different aspects of the field of Translation. For example, the first paper by Folkart examines the lexical items interpellate and hail used in North American academic discourse because of an English translation of a French language essay by Althusser. She studies the malformed patternings of these two lexical items and suggests that they are an artifact of less than competent translations. In the second paper, Lavigne examines the evolution of various strategies for translating Roman legal terminology into French. She focuses on the evolution of the techniques used to translate the Latin terms adgnatorum and adgnati by different French translators in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. On the other hand, Hosington examines in her paper The Shyp of Folys, an English translation by Alexander Barclay of the German play Das Narrenschiff by Sebastian Brant. The author focuses on the different "englishing" techniques used by Barclay to make his text relevant for the English audience in his time. The next paper by Deslile discusses the question of criticism of literary translations. The author addresses the central notion of 'disparity' between the source and the target text. The fifth paper in this third section is written by Bowker, who focuses on the effects that translation memories (TM) can have on the quality of the target texts. She also considers the limitations of TM tools as well as the problems they pose when they propose the wrong suggestions. Bowker suggests some solutions to avoid some of these limitations. In the following paper, Gow deals with the evaluation of the usefulness of TM tools using a sentence-based approach, such as Trados, versus TM tools using a character-string-within-a bitext (CSB)-based approach, such as MultiTrans. Another type of translation technology is analyzed in the next paper by Roberts and Bossé-Andrieu. These authors explain the importance of electronic corpora for translation. They focus on the main translation problems that translators have to face and offer some remedies based on corpora. Varantola also focuses on the use of corpora in translation in her paper; however, she also analyses the potential of modern electronic dictionaries for the translator. She explains the usefulness of electronic dictionaries based on large corpora and points out the importance of corpora to solve different genre or text-type stylistic issues in translation. The final paper of the volume is written by Bravo and explores the present state of film translation (FT) in Spain. He begins the paper explaining the industrial aspect of FT in Spain and then he concentrates on the problems related to translation itself. Bravo also discusses various emergent lines of research in FT.
This volume is a precious contribution to the fields of Lexicography, Terminology and Translation; therefore, it is an essential reading for researchers into these three fields. The papers compiled raise many important issues and offer plenty of suggestions for future research.
Beatriz Méndez Cendón
Universidad de Valladolid (España)
cendon@lia.uva.es