Deconinck, Julie, Humble, Philippe, Sepp, Arvi and Helene Stengersl (eds) (2017). Towards Transcultural Awareness in Translation Pedagogy. Berlin: LIT VERLAG, pp. 288, 29.90 €. ISBN: 978 3643909190.
This volume has been compiled by four experienced university translation teachers who subscribe to the notion that all translation is inherently about communication between and across cultures regardless of genre and context, and who believe that the aim of translation instruction is to raise learners’ awareness of the transcultural nature of translation. The volume consists of three main parts and each part made up of four contributions explores one aspect of transcultural awareness in translation pedagogy, namely theory, instruction and assessment, respectively.
Part I presents diverse theoretical reflections on translation pedagogy and transculturalism. In Chapter 1, Lambert examines the development of translation training (TT) and Translation Studies (TS), highlighting their independent histories, their recent integration into academia and the possible influence of the integration on their future development – will this lead to a much warranted transdisciplinary approach or further fragmentation? In Chapter 2, Walravens stresses the idea of translation as intercultural communication and translators as intercultural mediators by illustrating the similarities between intercultural studies (ICS) and TS. Inspired by ICS, she proposes to theorise TT by going ‘from praxis to theory, and back’. This brings us to Chapter 3, in which Rajagopalan, by contrast, challenges the view of culture as “a self-contained entity” and “translators as some kind of cultural broker” with reference to cross-pollination and hybridisation of cultures. Nevertheless, the author points out that translations will not be made obsolete and that emerging transnational and transcultural spaces will open up for new communicative opportunities instead. Finally, in Chapter 4, Tabakowska expands the scope of culture by arguing that, beyond such obvious categories as grammatical gender, number and verbal aspect, grammatical structures also have cultural meaning, which is substantiated with a Polish novel extract and a shampoo advertisement.
Part II reports on various pedagogical activities for enhancing transcultural awareness. In Chapter 1, Vid and Kucis illustrate how Critical Discourse Analysis can be used to explore ideological messages encrypted in English and German advertising slogans. They argue that these messages are regarded as cultural constraints and must be unearthed and properly handled in their translation into Slovenian. In Chapter 2, Naydenova describes how to raise Russian translation learners’ cultural awareness through a critical incident approach and a culture assimilator test in an undergraduate module specialised in banking and finance. Contrary to Chapters 1 & 2 which focus on highly specialised translation, Chapter 3 examines literary translation in a French-English translation course. Here, in order to enhance learners’ awareness of the challenges involved in the process of intercultural transfer in translation and their writing skills simultaneously, Woodsworth implements an alternative form of translation task which asks each student to interview a person from a third culture and write an English story about it. In Chapter 4, Vermeulen and Moreno show how Belgian L2 students of Spanish and translation are engaged in the production of audio description (a special variant of audiovisual translation), which is proven to be a powerful tool for raising learners’ intercultural awareness and competence.
Part III deals with assessment of transcultural competence, which is under-researched as compared to theory and instruction. In Chapter 1, Way stresses the importance of cultural empathy and illustrates how a three-fold approach, which has been successfully used in specialised translation courses, can not only help teachers build cultural empathy among legal translation trainees, but also allows them to assess their students’ progress using rubrics. In Chapter 2, Koby catalogues the errors caused by culture-specific items in authentic translation tests, revealing the inadequacy of the error categories of the American Translator Association and suggesting that there is a need for a more detailed system of error categorisation. In Chapter 3, Eyckmans reviews current practices of measuring cultural competence both as a separate construct and as part of translation competence. She proposes a reliable and valid norm-referenced method for assessing cultural competence on par with other sub-competences of translation ability. In Chapter 4, Rosier measures translator trainees’ intercultural competence before and after an international sojourn using a Multicultural Personality Questionnaire, which confirms the importance of study-abroad experiences in promoting learners’ multicultural awareness.
With both the theoretical and practical exploration outlined above, this volume will be worthwhile reading for both translation scholars and teachers interested in developing transcultural competence among translators. Moreover, it boasts a special relevance for specialised translation. By highlighting the universal transcultural nature of translating texts in various genres in the context of translation education, it adds to the growing efforts to explore the cultural dimension of specialised translation and can contribute to enhancing the awareness among specialised translation trainers and trainees that their work is no less an endeavour of transcultural communication. However, despite the merits mentioned above, as a book focused on transcultural awareness in translation pedagogy, it would be desirable if it could draw more on the emerging discourse on such relevant concepts as a “reflexive translator” (Tomozeiu et al. 2016: 261-262) and a “transcreator” (Katan 2016: 379), which highlight the role of translator in facilitating transcultural communication in this increasingly globalised world.
References
- Tomozeiu, Daniel, Kaisa Koskinen and Adele D’Arcangelo (2016). “Teaching intercultural competence in translator training.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 10(3): 251-267.
- Katan, David (2016). “Translation at the Cross-roads: Time for the Transcultural Turn?” Perspectives 24(3): 365-381.
Acknowledgements
This review was funded by CUFE Teacher Development Centre Fund under Grant No. JFY201929.
Huang Jian
Central University of Finance and Economics
E-mail: huangj@cufe.edu.cn