According to the author's introduction, this is the eighth edition of The Global Translator's Handbook, first published in 1985, but there is no hint of this on the title page or in the CIP details. The venerable history of the book does, however, become clear as you read, and some elements have a dated feel. The first 100 or so pages discuss various aspects of translation, whereas the latter 200 are appendices with long lists of organizations and publications – the sort of information which can largely be found through an internet search these days.
The style of the descriptive sections is often chatty and personal. Sofer (pen-name of the translator Mordecai Schreiber) explains the development of his career from biblical scholar to founder of a large translation agency. His intention is to provide “a sourcebook for all translations in all languages both in the United States and abroad”. This choice of term – “abroad” – does indicate the book's strong emphasis on the USA, particularly in the reference sections.
The first five chapters deal with theoretical aspects of translation, including the history of translation, the attributes required by professional translators with hints on how to become a good translator, and a “translator's self-evaluation”, assessing different levels of language competence although the categories are vague and would be difficult to apply to oneself objectively. The need to keep your language knowledge current is stressed.
There is an interesting chapter on translation problems occurring in specific languages. For Portuguese, Spanish, French and Chinese, these arise from different geographical variants of the language. For Japanese, there is a perceptive comment on the spiral nature of the sentence structure which gradually converges on a target. “The task of the translator is then to grasp what the target is, organize the paragraph into segments of suitable length, eliminate redundant portions, and render what is left into English”. This is a very different process from translating between two languages from the same linguistic family and similar cultural backgrounds.
The subsequent chapters are more practical, dealing with the “nuts and bolts” of translation work. There is guidance on the business approach to a piece of translation, how to assess the requirements and importantly, how long it will take. Sofer says, “speed in translation is the most important thing next to language proficiency”. There are practical tips on technique; for example, he recommends going through a document listing unknown terms, looking them up and thereby creating a word list which both saves time and gives an idea of the scope of the text.
There is a chapter on computers and the internet, but the twentieth-century origins of the book are evident in such comments as, “it is becoming more common every day to use electronic means such as e-mail or fax”. There is a brief discussion of software for translation and terminology databases and a section on machine translation but this would not be a primary source for this type of information. Other chapters give lists of subject fields where translation is often required, e.g. automotive industry, military, and sources of translation work such as government departments, non-governmental organizations and businesses. There are also chapters on having a career as an in-house translator, and on interpreting, highlighting the different skill set required.
The rest of the book consists of the appendices. There is a lengthy list of printed dictionaries for a wide-range of languages. It is difficult to assess the comprehensiveness of this but a search on Amazon for Kazakh dictionaries found several more than the two listed here. The Japanese dictionaries do not seem to include a character dictionary which is essential for a non-native reader. There is a list of worldwide dictionary suppliers and slightly bizarrely, of Microsoft addresses around the world.
Then there is a section of over 100 pages of Sources of Translation Work, almost exclusively US translation companies listed both by name and location, plus a list of US government departments. There are lists of courses for translators in the USA and Canada and worldwide translations organizations, some journals and a bibliography.
Overall the book has an old-fashioned feel. I would have found some of the early parts useful 25 years ago when I was trying to choose between translation and librarianship as a career. But much of the information in the latter half could now be found from judicious internet searches.
At times, there is an element of the comedian manqué in some of the text and the boxes containing jokes, so maybe Mr Sofer's next book should not simply be a new edition of this Handbook. He could trim the appendices and expand the earlier chapters into a memoir of what sounds to be a fascinating career, creating a work which could be more useful, and inspirational, to current and future generations of translators. As it stands, this book could have a home in careers libraries or in US public libraries, but is less useful as a reference source outside North America.
