Christina Schäffner (ed.). The Role of Discourse Analysis for Translation and in Translator Training, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney, Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2002, 95 p.

This book first appeared as volume 7, number 3 of the journal Current Issues in Language and Society. As with several other issues of this journal, there was judged to be sufficient interest for a separate publication in book form. The format of the contributions in the book therefore represent a rather special process by which the journal elicits submissions. A specialist in a field relevant to translation is invited to deliver a paper at Aston University to an audience that is also knowledgeable in the field. The ensuing debate is transcribed and published with the paper. In this particular case the speaker was Anna Trosberg of the Department of English in the Aarhus School of Business in Denmark. In addition to the debate itself there are responses to the paper prepared by Beverly Adab, Rodica Dimitriu, Carmen Millán-Varela, Peter Newmark, and Palma Zlateva, and Trosberg's concluding remarks.

The presentation plus reaction can lead to an uneven sense of direction, and both the editorial at the beginning and the sections of commentary on the paper make it clear that there was disagreement as to the applicability of the kind of analysis Trosberg was exposing. The title of Trosberg's presentation is Discourse Analysis as Part of Translator Training. In the abstract she clearly limits the scope of her intention by describing the class in which she uses this approach. Her students are taking an optional course in translation, and their interest is in “in-depth textual analysis that is translation oriented” (p. 9).

The difficulty with describing this paper as a publication stems from the author's and the reader's differing expectations. Trosberg is not suggesting an original contribution to discourse studies itself. Hers is a pedagogic approach, not a model, and it is eclectic. As Christina Schäffner points out in what is labelled an editorial rather than an introduction, the use of some terms from the Halliday school of linguistics and some from discourse linguistic perspectives leads to terminological confusion, a confusion compounded by personal uses of terms well defined as having different meanings elsewhere (Peter Newmark's remarks p. 57). In addition, the long list of factors Trosberg suggests be considered leads to the question of what has been left out. Beverly Adab raises this issue (p. 71) in her response to Trosberg.

To sum up, then, the interest of this volume is the debate about the amount and kind of overt analysis that will prove useful in the translation classroom.