Florentsen, P.C. (1998): Translation as Recontextualisation. Framing Hamlet by Means of Neo-Pragmatist Philosophy, Ph.D. dissertation, Center for Translation Studies and Lexicography, Department of English, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 304 p.

Peter Christian Florentsen’s investigation into three Danish translations of Hamlet is an important undertaking, both for a Danish audience, and for a wider community of translation scholars. As for the former, the Danish setting and source text “have contributed to the perception that [Hamlet] is, to all intents and purposes, a Danish play” (p. 184). Reviewing the translations of Lembcke (1864), Osterberg (1928), and Sløk (1971) allow the author to determine the changing aesthetics of the Danish target audience, in itself an ambitious task. It is, however, at the same time a discussion of neo-pragmatist philosophy applied to language, and a philosophical inquiry into whether language is a rational process. Indeed, the review of a number of theorists, among them Kant, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Rorty, make up the bulk of Florentsen’s dissertation. By the author’s own admission, the greatest influence on his own conception of language is Richard Rorty, author of a number of works such as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991). The study is organized in five parts, subdivided into a total of thirteen chapters. Despite its seemingly complex structure, concise summaries at the end of each chapter help the reader stay focused. The stated aims of the study are “to explore the consequences of neo-pragmatist language philosophy for the study of inquiry, language, communication, and translation” (p. 21). Key terms of this study include language-game, vocabulary, culture, metaphor, gestalt-switch, context/frame/recontextualisation/context reframing, norm, and purpose. As Florentsen explains, his approach displaces “the relation between source and target text from being an epistemological, ontological or metaphysical relation to a sociological relation between the norms, values, and interests of one context and those of another” (p. 22). In the review of philosophy of language, the author begins with three metaphors of language, in which the views of Kant, Quine, Davidson and Wittgenstein are assessed. Florentsen opts for the paradigm of language as a game, a tool and coherent whole (Davidson and Wittgenstein) as opposed to a clearly defined structure. In Part II, “Theories of incommensurability and untranslatability,” profound questioning of these concepts lead him to dismiss the distinction between the ideal and the metaphorical, a distinction he says is devoid of epistemological or ontological pretensions. Meaning, Florentsen argues, needs to be situationally or contextually determined (p. 114). In Part III Florentsen establishes what is meant by the key concepts context and frame, a dialogue with the communication theories of Bateson and Austin and Searle. In Part IV, “The translational Frame,” the theories of Nida, Reiss and Vermeer, and Toury/Hermans are considered. It is here that Florentsen discusses norms in depth. The aim is a descriptive study of translation using “norms” and “skopos” as methodological tools. By combining the concepts and terminologies of Bateson and Toury, Florentsen presents a view of translation as “a peculiar kind of context reframing process which includes the more or less familiarising transformation of foreign source material according to cultural, political, and economical norms” (p. 178). Norms are to be understood as both complex and plural, and despite a number of limitations (such as not taking deviations from the norm into account), Florentsen proceeds to analyse the three translations of Hamlet as an activity guided and influenced by norms. Without a doubt, Part V of is the most original contribution of this dissertation. It is here that Florentsen reviews Lembcke, Østerberg, and Sløk’s translations of Hamlet, combining literary history with philology, and prosody with theory. Among the strengths of this comparative analysis are the repeated use of the same …