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The Associated Press Stylebook 2015 This new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries detailing the AP’s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage. Learn more
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This is the best book on translation I have read. I am a professional translator (American who does German to English, and I live in Germany). The book is not bogged down in the typical pedantic "linguist-speak" that you usually find in books about translation. The author ranges far and wide, from oral interpreting, to Biblical translation, to Google Translate and machine translation. I particularly liked his exploding of myths (the "Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", and the myth that because Spanish and Chinese have a lot of speakers, that makes them big translation languages). The author shows that only 5 % of books from 2000-2009 were translated into Chinese (into Arabic is even more dismal). Only 10% of books were translated into English in that period, which shocked me as an "into English" translator. The author cites a figure that 78% of books in that period were into just two languages: French and German, which is truly amazing. This means that English, German, and French are by far the most important languages for translation, particularly for literature and books. It also shows that Americans and Brits don't read foreign books (!).
A good portion of this book is about what translation is. The notion of translating "sense for sense", not "word for word" is of course good advice, and very old advice. The author handles things like, what do we mean by "literal translation", and why it is harder to translate Asterix than Proust.
I loved the discussion of "UP translation" and "DOWN translation". (I won't tell you what that is, you have to read the book).
All-in-all, probably the best book I have ever read about translation, and very accessible to anyone, translators and people just interested in language. I can't recommend this book more.
A must read for translators.
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful
As someone who comes from a family of translators and who has worked in translation himself, I am utterly glad that someone has come up with a book like this, an honest and passionate attempt to unveil the world of translation to the average person and spark the debate among the more knowledgeable ones.
In attempting to write a book that covers, well, pretty much everything about translation, David Bellos has produced a comprehensive and badly needed primer full of insight, yet a not-so coherent and cohesive unity. The book is divided into 32 small sections (yes, 32), each dealing with a different aspect of translation, from the meaning of "meaning", to the alleged "myth" of literal translation, with newswires and the ridiculous sophistication of coffee-shop language somewhere in-between. Some of these sections are delightful and concisely written, others are riddled with analogies and humorous attempts that distract from the main topic, yet others are frankly repetitive or well under-developed. The result is less a piece that seems to flow from chapter to chapter, but rather something that feels at times like a collection of disparate short essays that rumble from bananas to bibles to eskimos and back to translation. While some chapters indeed perform liaisons to previous or following ones, sadly that is not the overall feeling that one gets when tackling the text.
I guess this is the unavoidable result of attempting to put together so many different topics under a single umbrella, while trying to give equal importance to each and every single one. But my other assumption is that the book could have greatly benefited from a better editing job, which in turn would have resulted in a more 'natural' feeling to the final product.Read more ›
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58 of 65 people found the following review helpful
I am writing this in English, just because of a lot of incalculable contingencies that made English the language I grew up with. There have been thousands of languages, and of the current ones, there are plenty that have literature or consumer goods that I might be interested in. I'm bad at languages anyway, but unless I were a language genius, it would be folly to expect me to know all those languages well enough to, say, enjoy a novel in each. So I rely on translators. All of us rely on translators, not just for novels but for instructions on how to put that bookshelf together, or how our governments will relate to other governments. And everybody knows that things are lost in translation, that a literal translation is the most faithful, that the translator is inherently a traitor, and plenty of other commonplaces about translation, which are commonplaces because translation is so very important to us. David Bellos is eager to remove such clichéd thinking about translations and translators. He directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, and he is a professor of French, and he has done many literary translations himself. His book _Is That a Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything_ (Faber and Faber, Inc.) is a series of essays about his work and the world of languages, and what translation is and is not. It is obvious that Bellos has had a lot of intelligent fun writing about his work and that of other translators in specialties most of us never think about. He takes particular enjoyment in killing clichés about translation, and his book is a witty tour of the way humans get around the eternal language problem.
So, is anything lost in translation? Bellos dislikes the idea.Read more ›
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This item: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
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