Robinson, Douglas (2011): Translation and the Problem of Sway. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 227 p.

As translation theories have evolved to integrate cultural elements over the past decades, the concept of faithfulness to the original or correctness inevitably ceased to be the dominant evaluative standards of particular translation products. The production and reception of translation are increasingly seen as a result of complex governing powers exerted by various aspects of cultural contexts. Those governing powers or pressures have become the focus of present day translation related studies. Among the different works theorizing those pressures, Descriptive Translation Studies are quite successful in describing the pressures driven by the literary norms of target culture and the professional agents, which can be seen as the characterizing the socioeconomic approach. Other theories place more emphasis on describing habitualized interpretation of certain translated products, such as Venuti’s discussions on the concept of “interpretant” and Mona Baker’s discussions about “narrativity.” Translation and the Problem of Sway, authored by Douglas Robinson, makes a further contribution to the effort of theorizing those cultural formed habits and psychological trends along the lines of Venuti and Baker’s work, but what makes his work innovative and contributory is the integration of the study of normative and non-normative sways using his own conceptual framework – somatic theory. This book consists of six chapters. In Chapter 1, Introduction, Translation and Sway (pp. 1-15), the author suggests that “sway” which influences translator’s work is defined too narrowly. The translation norms theorized by Toury are merely the “positive” versions of translational sways, which exclude explicit rules and fully subjective idiosyncrasy. Venuti’s work on interpretant and Baker’s work in narrativity also treat what sways the translator as “bias,” which apparently carries a negative meaning. The author suggests, alternatively, to subsume the norms and values we hold most dear and the bias under the same category – “sway.” To put the sway in Robinson’ words, it is “almost a group dynamic, not typically something that happens inside individual nervous system (p. 9),” and those “sways” that weigh upon the translators’ work are the focus of Robinson’s book. In Chapter 2, Lawrence Venuti on the Interpretant (pp. 17-39), the author introduces Venuti’s concept of the interpretant and points out that the semiotic terms used by Venuti in this definition are largely depersonalized tend to reduce human creativity to a robotic sense, which is the staple viewpoint of many theorists like Martindale. The author introduces his somatic model of human interaction both to give Venuti’s theory more complexity and to refute Martindale’s accusation. In Chapter 3, The Case of Alex. Matson (pp. 41-111), the author conducts a long case study of a single translator, Alex Matson (1888-1972), who spent his childhood in England and adulthood in his native Finland. The author analyses Matson’s translations into Finnish of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and William Faulkner’s Wild Palms and As I Lay Dying, and his translations into English of Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 novel Seven Brothers and several works by Aino Kallas and F. E. Sillanpää with the objective of testing Venuti’s “formal” interpretant. The case study finds that Matson’s awkward English cannot be attributed to a foreignizing attention to the original. It also shows that Venuti’s formal interpretant is not valid enough to account for the complexity of translation phenomenon. The author suggests that there are rhetorical interpretants guiding our interactions with other people; that rhetorical interpretants might be divided into logical interpretants (governing structure), pathetic interpretants (governing affective interaction), and ethical interpretants (governing the perception of character); and that Venuti’s two types of interpretant, the formal and the thematic, should be seen as subcategories of the logical …