Übersetzung und Leser can be roughly divided into two parts. On the one hand it is a descriptive study of the relationship between one Dutch source text, Multatuli's Max Havelaar, and several of its German translations (Chapters 6-9), while on the other hand it is an attempt to place the entire field of Translation Studies into a communication-theoretical perspective based on the concepts of Siegfried Schmidt's Grundriß der empirischen Literaturwissenschaft (1980) (Chapters 1-5). It is in this part that Stegeman's book proves to be a very ambitious book indeed. Its claim here seems to stop just short of announcing the redemption of Translation Studies as an autonomous discipline. The motivation for this attempt is a familiar one: discontent with the present state of the discipline. But what is Stegeman's conception of Translation Studies? First of all it is not particularly up-to-date. In relation to its subject matter, the book reveals some alarming bibliographical lacunae: even though about 110 items in the bibliography are on the study of translation, only 24 of them are post-1980, and a good half of those are papers from just two 1986 collections: Snell-Hornby's Neuorientierung and House and Blum-Kulka's Interlingual and Intercultural Communication. On the other hand, only one rather marginal article of Toury's is mentioned in the book and the work of the Göttingen research center is totally ignored. In my opinion, this is a serious criticism of an empirical study carried out in the late eighties, and at any rate it puts into perspective statements such as ". . .so begegnet man in den jüngsten Veröffentlichungen zu übersetzten literarischen Werken doch selten neuen theoretischen Auffassungen" (p. 17) and "Nur wenige Veröffentlichungen befassen sich mit der vergleichenden Beschreibung des ursprünglichen Textes und seiner Übersetzung" (p. 28).

References

Delabastita, Dirk

1991 “A False Opposition in Translation Studies: Theoretical versus/and Historical Approaches”. Target 3:2. 137’152.  

Holmes, James S.

1988 Translated!: Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

House, Juliane and Shoshana Blum-Kulka

eds. 1986 Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. Tübingen: Narr.

Leuven-Zwart, Kitty M. van

1984 Vertaling en origineel: Een vergelijkende beschrij-vingsmethode voor integrale vertalingen, ontwikkeld aan de hand van Nederlandse vertalingen van Spaanse narratieve teksten. Dordrecht: Foris.

Leuven-Zwart, Kitty M. van

1989 “Translation and Original: Similarities and Dis-similarities, I”. Target 1:2. 151’181.  

Leuven-Zwart, Kitty M. van

1990 “Translation and Original: Similarities and Dis-similarities, II”. Target 2:1. 69’95.  

Schmidt, Siegfried J.

1980 Grundriß der empirischen Literaturwissenschaft. Braun-schweig: Vieweg.

[ p. 119 ]

Schmidt, Siegfried J.

1982 Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literature. Hamburg: Buske.

Snell-Hornby, Mary

1986 Übersetzungswissenschaft—eine Neuorientierung: Zur Integ-rierung von Theorie und Praxis. Tübingen: Francke.

Toury, Gideon

1985 “A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies”. Theo Her-mans, ed. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London and Sydney: Croom Helm 1985 16’41.