246 Resenhas
control, but also the ability to re- ence, technology, humanities, and
sist such actions. In the article, social sciences, as well as China’s
“Spanish Film Translation and most recent translation boom.
Cultural Patronage: The Filtering Translation and Power also
and Manipulation of Imported offers contributions by Alexandra
Material during Franco’s Dicta- Lianeri, Michael Cronin, Carol
torship”, Camino Gutiérrez Lanza Maier, and editor Edwin Gentzler.
discusses how Republicans during For those studying translation at a
the dictatorship found power when higher level, this collection pro-
international pressure and internal vides a diverse look into the fac-
economic stress broke down cen- ets of the power of translation.
sorship and manipulation of for- The presence of power in transla-
eign films, which opened a win- tion is seen through out history,
dow for intercultural relations from 19th century imperialism to
with an isolated Spain. present day, and can be found in
Cultural transformations all parts of the world, from China
brought on by translations are also to Latin America. Gentzler and
present in Lin Kenas’s article, Tymoczko conclude their introduc-
“Translation as a Catalyst for So- tion by saying, “these different
cial Change in China”. He exam- perspectives and views cannot be
ines the five most influential peri- neatly stitched together, recon-
ods of translation in China’s his- ciled, or abstracted, but in their
tory and their impacts on culture, very diversity and richness they
including the translation of Bud- represent the many facets of trans-
dhist scriptures, the translation of lation and power.”
Western texts in fields such as sci- Dana Bisbee
St. Lawrence University
In Computer-Aided Translation
Lynne Bowker. Computer-Aided Technology Lynne Bowker gives
Translation Technology: A Prac- a basic introduction to assessable
tical Introduction. University of computer-based methods that fa-
Ottawa Press: 2002, 185 pp. cilitate human translation. In her
introduction, Bowker, who is also
Resenhas 247
the author of Working with Spe- ter provides information about
cialized Language: A Practical other new technologies and
Guide to Using Corpora (2002), emerging trends. The book con-
explains that this book is not a re- cludes with a glossary of terms as
view of Machine Translation well as selected reviews of com-
(MT), which works without the mercially-available CAT tools.
presence of a human translator, but Chapter one, “Why Learn
rather of Computer-Aided Trans- about Translation Technology?”,
lation (CAT): “Although advances explains that as our world becomes
in machine translation continue to a more global society there is a
be made, for the foreseeable fu- greater need for translation and es-
ture at least, human translators pecially comprehensive but quick
will still have a large role to play translation. In such a competitive
in the production of translated marketplace, experience with CAT
texts,” says Bowker. CAT assists tools is becoming a necessary skill
translators in their work but does for translation students. Transla-
not do the translation for them and tion technology can also facilitate
therefore does not eliminate the translation research and generate
human translator from the process. data for future empirical investi-
There have been very few com- gations that were either impossible
prehensive reviews of CAT done or difficult to conduct in the past.
prior to this book, which makes Bowker states that, “Electronic
Bowker’s study especially signifi- corpora and translation memories
cant and useful. can provide large quantities of eas-
The book is divided into six ily accessible data that can be used
chapters. The first chapter is a sec- to study translation.” She claims
tion on the need to learn about that major research benefits include
technology in the translation field. investigation of translation strate-
Following this is a chapter on how gies and decisions (available
to capture data in electronic form. through the use of bilingual paral-
Chapter three describes corpora lel corpora) as well as the expanse
and corpus-analysis tools. Chap- of teaching practices for students
ter four treats terminology-man- through the comparison of archives
agement systems, followed by of student translations.
chapter five on translation- The second chapter, “Captur-
memory systems. The last chap- ing Data in Electronic Form,” dis-
248 Resenhas
cusses the two main ways of con- mediate contexts), and collocation
verting text to electronic form: Op- generators (which demonstrate how
tical Character Recognition (OCR) often two words are placed together
and voice recognition. OCR works purposefully as opposed to ran-
with scanners to convert the text domly). According to Bowker,
from an image to a text document with this technology it is impor-
which can then be accessed by soft- tant to remember that the user is
ware and altered for later docu- the one responsible for making and
ments. Voice recognition technol- interpreting the data and that the
ogy allows the user to speak directly technology is not capable of exist-
into the computer and then convert ing without human intervention.
the spoken data into a text docu- Chapter four, “Terminology-
ment. Both technologies are widely Management Systems” describe sys-
available commercially and vary in tems that have existed for a rela-
price. In addition to these programs, tively long period of time but only
a conversion program may or may lately have improved enough to be-
not be needed in order to convert come significant in the translation
the electronic data into a form that world. TMSs can be formatted to
can be read by diverse types of soft- store information according to dis-
ware. tinct concepts, allowing mapping in
In “Corpora and Corpus- several language directions. This
Analysis Tools,” Bowker defines enables the user to create and ma-
a corpus as, “a large collection of nipulate fields of data, then share
electronic texts that have been gath- and exchange this data between
ered according to explicit criteria.” other users and systems. It is also
Corpora can be arranged in many possible to retrieve data through
different manners, monolingual or wildcard searches, term extraction,
bilingual, aligned or non-aligned, pre-translation, fuzzy matching,
raw or annotated, etc. Corpus- and active terminology recognition.
analysis tools allow information to In chapter five, it is clear that
be displayed, accessed and manipu- “Translation-Memory Systems” are
lated according to the user’s pref- the most recent up-and-coming tech-
erences. The corpus-analysis tools nology and are growing immensely
usually include word-frequency in their popularity among transla-
lists, concordancers (which show tors. These systems connect the
all patterns of words with their im- source and the target texts and store
Resenhas 249
these parallels in a database. This tools relies on the continuous edu-
permits the translator to use previ- cation of translators, the construc-
ously translated excerpts again in tion of user-friendly tools, the cre-
other points of the text. The TM ation of electronic sources texts,
system compares the new source text and a close relationship between
with prior translations. The match- the tool developers and the trans-
ing of these excerpts can be exact lation training institutes. Some of
matching, fully matching, fuzzy the proposals for new CAT tools
matching, term matching, or sub- documented here will become
segment matching. The use of this available in the near future.
technology is limited to texts that Computer-Aided Translation
are being updated, revised and have Technology is written as a general
repetitive content. It also can be overview and introduction for
applied to series of texts in the same translation students. This book is
subject field. especially useful for students who
Chapter six, “Other New desire to study translation technol-
Technologies and Emerging ogy and students who believe that
Trends”, is a brief review of the an understanding of this technol-
current and up-and-coming tech- ogy can be helpful for their career.
nologies in translation and how In the introduction, Bowker states
they affect the field. Since there that “CAT tools support transla-
is increasingly more work for tors by helping them to work more
translators (such as translation of efficiently” making this overview
software and Web pages), the de- of these tools beneficial to all trans-
velopment of new translation tech- lators interested in making their
nologies is, out of necessity, at an work more efficient.
all time high. The success of CAT Nyssa Knarvik
St. Lawrence University
On Translation, by John Sallis,
John Sallis. On Translation. professor of Philosophy at Penn-
Bloomington: Indiana University sylvania State University, is a
Press, 2002, 125 pp. four-part investigation of transla-
tion and its inevitable difficulties.
