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Succeeding waves of “communication-based” approaches to language learning throughout the 20th century seem to have firmly established the idea that formal grammar teaching has little or no role to play in the language learning process. It is not surprising then that the idea of training students of translation in the arcana of comparative linguistics has been the object of fierce controversy over the years. This collection comes down firmly in favor of the idea that comparative grammar can and should be taught to students of translation. A meeting in 2017 brought together specialists of discourse analysis, grammar and translation theory from Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and Germany, sixteen of whom contributed to the book. Its fourteen chapters, twelve in French, two in English, are organized into four sections.

The opening chapter, written collectively by the six editors, serves as an introduction, setting out the contents of each article and showing how each answers the central questions raised here and seldom addressed elsewhere: not simply should one teach grammar, but rather how can it be done most effectively? Which linguistic framework should be used? What particular language problems should be addressed? How can the teacher effectively convert theory into efficient and effective practice for the student?

The four chapters of Section 1 are devoted to the question “What grammar do translators need?”

Peter Blumenthal (Analyse contrastive de la cohérence: enchainer les idées en français et en allemand) first looks at the problem of coherence, focusing on newspaper articles in French and German. French, he argues, often uses a “hierarchical” approach to textual coherence, where the link to the central topic is maintained by a series of “expressive” adverbs placed at strategic points in the text. The use of the passé simple verb tense allows French to maintain linear coherence between events which German must compensate for through time adverbs like und dann. German, on the other hand, uses anaphoric adverbs like auch to establish equivalence in ways which are difficult to translate into French. Moreover, its rich array of compound structures allows the former to link words in the same semantic field, while French must try to compensate with various sorts of lexical expressions.

In the second chapter of this section, Michael Herslund (Typologie lexicale, grammaire et traduction) compares the lexicons of French and Danish in search of a general “typology” through which the semantic components of lexical items in Romance and Germanic languages could be codified in the spirit of Talmy (1985). His carefully thought out discussion examines in turn verbs of movement and position, the “qualia structure” of nouns (Pustejovsky 1995) and the semantic complementarity of verbs and nouns. French verbs of movement, for instance, encode [direction] in the verb and either leave [manner] to the context, or add a prepositional complement: sortir en courant. Danish however encodes [manner] in the verb and expresses [direction] through a co-predicate: løbe ud. French nouns, contrary to Danish, do not have a common root from which to derive specific descriptive terms. So, a Danish series like personvogn, barnevogn, indkobsvogn, etc. can only be expressed in French by distinct terms like voiture, landau, chariot, etc. For Herslund, as for Blumenthal, the lexicon plays a crucial role in the typology of languages and is something the translator needs to pay careful attention to.

The lexicon is also the focus of interest in Jean Szlamovicz’s article Lexique, valeur référentielle et domaine notionnel: pour une sémantique traductive. The notion «domaine notionnel» is a concept central to the theory of the French linguist, Antoine Culioli (1999), and includes not only semantic and syntactic coding, but also stylistic and cultural connotations. From this perspective, it is obviously impossible to translate a term simply in terms of its denotation, or to teach vocabulary in terms of lists of equivalent terms. Take for example the English word block. The French pâté de maison or bloc miss the fact that Americans measure urban space in terms of blocks – He lives three blocks away – or use the term to conceptualize groups of objects: a block of flats/un immeuble d’habitations or a block of shares/un portefeuille d’actions. Szlamovicz gives many other examples of this phenomenon, for instance the metaphorical use of adjectives like bad or poor in English, or the problems posed by the translation of verbs of posture like shrug, look, frown or nod.

Béatrice Costa and Bénédicte Van Gysel (Grammaire et rythme: Une complétude difficile à atteindre) point out that the grammatical metalanguage itself can be a serious obstacle for many students. Take for example the confusion caused by the terms used to describe tense and aspect, like perfect or preterit, and their equivalent terms in other languages. The authors look at the history of such terms and recommend using a more transparent system such as that found in Delisle, Lee-Jahnke, et al. (2010) and focusing on comparative stylistics. In some cases there is simply no equivalent for a given verbal structure in the source language, for instance the subjective mode in Danish. They also show how syntax can give rhythm to a language like Classical Greek and discuss the ways Modern French or Danish deal with this problem. Finally, they admit, following Henri Meschonnic, that certain things, like poetic rhythm, cannot be “taught” but depend on the student’s literary sensitivity. The student needs to be a writer as well as a translator.

The four articles in the second section offer a variety of answers to the question: “What linguistic framework works best with translation students?” All of the authors in this section have opted for theories which favor an empirical approach to the relationship between form and meaning in context. All spend considerable time studying the semantic dimension and the different levels of interpretation for each form. All base their claims on actual exercises carried out with their students in a variety of language pairs.

Marina Manfredi (Functional Grammar as a Tool for Translator Training) opts for Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). After presenting the main lines of Halliday’s approach, she argues that the theory of meaning behind SFG and the importance it gives to context and usage make it particularly interesting for translation students, allowing them to bridge the gap between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. The author gives numerous examples of translation from English to Italian, showing how SFG throws light on problems like grammatical metaphor, pre- and post-modification, modality and appraisal.

Alice Delorme Benites (La grammaire dans le bon sens? Intégrer l’usage et la contrastivité dans un cours de grammaire pour étudiants-traducteurs) uses Lakoff’s Construction Grammar (CG) and more precisely Croft’s Radical Construction Grammar (RCG). She discusses the limits of what traditional grammar has to offer the translator. Prescriptive grammar often has nothing to say about regionalisms or slang expressions. Descriptive grammar forces the student to work his way through tons of data before finding an appropriate translation. RCG offers a way out of this dilemma. The relationship between meaning and structure in this framework allows the translator to examine the various functions of a message in a given context and to compare usage in contrasting languages. The author then goes through three constructions in German and French – the Conditional, complex sentences and the passive – which pose considerable problems to students, and shows how Construction Grammar can be used to improve translations.

Jean-Pierre Gabilan (Approche métopérationnelle de la traduction de l’imparfait vers l’anglais) argues in favor of Adamczewski’s Meta-Operational Grammar (MOG). He takes the reader through a series of examples, first of English verb forms translated with the French imparfait, then of French imparfaits translated into English, to demonstrate the extraordinarily polysemous nature of the French verb form. While traditional grammar has tended to focus on the aspectual imperfect value, Gabilan shows that this is totally inadequate. The MOG, he argues, by calculating the relationship between an invariant semantic content of the imparfait, which he defines as “non-assertive,” and a variety of specific, contextually determined values, offers a much more interesting approach for translators. Numerous examples of translation in both directions are given in support of this claim.

Cristina Castellani and Sonia Gerolimich (Quelle linguistique au service de la traduction? Approche contrastive français-italien du passif) prefer Maurice Gross’ Lexique-Grammaire (LG). They likewise show how the translation of a particular construction, in this case the Italian passive form, poses considerable problems to students, yet remains largely unexplained in traditional grammar books. Gross’s LG provides a useful framework, they argue, by focusing on the whole sentence and applying formal manipulations – addition, transformation, substitution – which bring out the syntactico-semantic properties of the different constructions. They work in three stages with their students: first, collecting examples and thinking about their meaning; then, applying the substitution and addition operations; and finally, translating. This method significantly improved student translations

The third section contains three articles whose main concern is not the theoretical appeal of a given linguistic framework, but the practical solutions the authors have found for improving their students’ skills.

Alberto Bramati (Enseigner la grammaire pour la traduction: traduire le pronom clitique on en italien) chooses the French indefinite pronoun on as a good example of something which his students have trouble translating into Italian and for which the available grammars and dictionaries offer little help. He singles out two linguistic studies which shed light on the problem – Blanche-Benveniste (2003) and Fløttum et al. (2007) – and works out a teaching system based on their analyses. First, he simplifies the problem by restricting the exercises to the three main uses of the pronoun and their most frequent translations, then asks the students to work out the rules based on a corpus of authentic examples.

Rudy Loock (Parce que “grammaticalement correct” ne suffit pas: le respect de l’usage grammatical en langue cible) underscores the inadequacy of “grammatically correct” translations to meet the needs of a professional translator and argues in favor of using parallel corpora as a way of reducing the influence of the source language. First, he asks his students to study the ways professionals translate existential constructions (there is/are) before attempting to make their own translations. Then he has them work through a corpus of obituary notices to see the different ways the deceased is referred to. He notes a distinct improvement in the idiomaticity of their translations and points out the limits of automatic translators for this type of problem.

Finally, Guillaume Deneufbourg (Etude contrastive sur corpus néerlandais-français du verbe blijken) also resorts to parallel corpora to work on translating expressions of epistemic modality from Dutch to French. He focuses on “evidentiality,” that is, the notion of the source of knowledge. For instance, in Jan blijkt heel gevoclig te zijn (Jan apparaître PRES très sensible de être) → Jean s’avère (être) très sensible, the speaker infers from what he/she has heard, that Jan is very sensitive. It is impossible to translate this correctly without knowing the context. Using the Dutch Parallel Corpus, he has his students work out the frequency of various translations and then study the link between each one and the context. This improves their ability to use the tools of modern translation and their awareness of subtle differences in meaning and usage.

The fourth and final section of the book contains two articles, the first devoted to problems posed by translating German prepositions into French, the second to students’ sensitivity to socio-linguistic factors in English L2, such as the formal vs the informal styles. While most of the problems discussed here have already come under scrutiny in the preceding chapters, both articles add a new dimension by focusing on student errors in translation and analysis.

First, Adrian Kefer (Problèmes posés par les prépositions allemandes aux étudiants en traduction allemand-français) built up a corpus of student translation errors in order to establish a typology and hence a teaching strategy. A detailed discussion of these errors leads to a tripartite classification: clumsy or incorrect structures in the target language, insufficient attention paid to the co-text and confusion about the meaning of the preposition in the source text. Unfortunately, the author does not really show how student performance can be improved, aside from becoming more aware of the problems through the analytical process itself.

Finally, Jim J.J. Ureel, Isabelle S. Robert and Iris Schrijver (The Development of Sociloinguistic Competence in Future Translators: A Survey of Translation Trainees’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Formality in L2 English) note that few studies have been devoted to students’ ability to detect and translate differences in register. They devised a simple test and submitted it to 224 translation students in Antwerp. The results are interesting, but, like the preceding article, there are no clear perspectives in terms of teaching strategy, though the authors plan to pursue their work and extend their study over the long term.

The overall impression after reading this interesting and well documented collection is that there is an enormous potential here for future research. The many detailed studies of specific linguistic problems should contribute in the coming years to better understanding the needs of student translators and to providing them with more adequate documentation and teaching practices.