Book review

Review of Peter Flynn. Translating in the Local Community

(Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies). New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. viii + 184 pp.

This book by Peter Flynn is a performance. While its scholarly ambitions are obvious from the beginning to the end, it deserves to be read on three different levels: as a first-person narrative; as a series of episodes in an autobiography (especially in Chapters 3, 4, and 9); and mainly, as a remarkable scholarly book. Such a triadic distinction in terms of genres is itself central and explicit in the book, as one might imagine. But the combination is a surprise to the extent that the title, the organization, and the order of the case studies presented in the nine numbered chapters leave no doubt about the dominant genre. Many scholarly works happen to be informed by similar categories, but without claiming to have been so. In Flynn’s case, such combinations are more part of the methodological “Approach and Positioning” than of the “Basic Assumptions and Theoretical Underpinnings” (Chapters 2 and 1, respectively). And the narrative? It simply looks like a report that borrows some of its features from fictional narratives (Gérard Genette is mentioned in the bibliography), alluding to several realistic time references (e.g., the COVID-19 crisis), and the narrator’s personal mobility refers to networks of trams, buses, and trains in Ghent, “the city on wheels” (61–62, 68–69), then to a very particular Italian restaurant, an Irish pub, a block of flats, a secondary school, and a city registration office.

The book is written with virtuosity and in splendid English, except from the moment the characters in the narrative fragments are identified with the aid of dialogues in Flemish dialects or Turkish, Italian, Irish, and other languages. What a microcosm of styles and expressions, one might say, in case the local community would happen to ignore migration and mobility or the “ubiquity of translation” (e.g., Kittel et al. 2007Kittel, Harald, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Fritz Paul eds. 2007 Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung/An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies/Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction. Vol. 2. Berlin: De Gruyter and Mouton.). Flynn himself becomes one of the crucial characters through his fluctuations between colloquial and (very) intellectual registers. Beyond translation and/or translating, various language issues unite and divide communities from many different origins, and the analysis is inspired throughout by many theoreticians and by sophisticated scholarly frameworks from Translation Studies (TS), sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, sociology, and anthropology.

The real challenges dealt with in Translation in the Local Community are translation and quite a few language issues in the city of Ghent, which from the Flemish or Belgian perspective are no longer that local. Flynn considers several particular settings seemingly without aiming at any global conclusions. An issue in our internationalized — or internationalizing — world is whether the focus should be on one particular local community or on the local community in general terms. Flynn is the first to realize the bottom-up and top-down implications of the title as well as the orientation of his work. On his way into the inner life of his city, he refers to events since 2015 and since the COVID-19 crisis; diachrony, or space and time, are part of the enterprise. This includes his own background, somewhere in Ireland long before 2015, and his position as an observer and a scholar whose initial research focused on Irish poetry in Dutch translation. The reader would have good reason to expect from the beginning a nice piece of storytelling if it were not for the first fourteen pages of Chapter 1 on “Basic Assumptions and Theoretical Underpinnings.” In fact, without excluding several of the options listed so far, the author provides us with a very original piece of empirical research and with a rich contribution to the still relatively new discipline of TS.

Empirical research on translation is obviously older than the 1970s, but it intensified as a crucial part of TS since Holmes ([1972] 2000)Holmes, James S. [1972] 2000 “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 172–185. London: Routledge.. The Holmes article had a heavy influence on the development of the new discipline on the basis of its distinctions between different areas of TS, which got their own labels. Holmes’ main successor, Toury (1980)Toury, Gideon 1980 In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics., provided the empirical area with a new name (i.e., ‘descriptive translation studies’, long before using it in the title of his later book [Toury 1995Toury, Gideon 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ]) and with a key task in the establishment of TS in general. There is no doubt that Flynn, without discussing his position from such perspectives, envisages participating in empirical TS. While recognizing such options, he devotes considerable attention to very explicit theoretical frameworks. Hence the book sets itself apart from any previous cultural-empirical research that ignored theoretical concepts.

It is not by coincidence that Flynn’s positioning happens to be rather innovative in modern TS. The long tradition of source/target explorations between writers, countries, and genres has been submitted to heavy conceptual top-down revisions under the influence of internationalization, media, norms, new theories, and other generalization trends. According to Marais (2014)Marais, Kobus 2014 Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. New York: Routledge. , so-called Western TS has reduced the translation concept to those translations that are produced with the support of computers, which implies that certain continents and cultures are largely ignored. In fact, the non-computerized traditions had been part of rich discussions between Harris (2013)Harris, Brian 2013 An Annotated Chronological Bibliography of Natural Translation Studies with Native Translation and Language Brokering 1913–2012. https://​www​.academia​.edu​/5855596​/Bibliography​_of​_natural​_translation and Toury (1984)Toury, Gideon 1984 “The Notion of ‘Native Translator’ and Translation Teaching.” In Die Theorie des Übersetzens und ihr Aufschlusswert für die Übersetzungs- und Dolmetschdidaktik [Translation theory and its implementation in the teaching of translating and interpreting] (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 247), edited by Wolfram Wilss and Gisela Thome, 186–195. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. on concepts such as ‘natural translator’ or ‘native translator’ since the first years of the norms-based approach. It remains obvious, however, that besides contemporary interpreting or media translation, many oral translation phenomena have hardly been integrated into the agenda of TS. But what can be established on the basis of a few chapters on one particular Flemish city? Flynn himself avoids such questions with his bottom-up approach, but the reader and the discipline cannot ignore them. He moves through a few streets and street corners (Chapter 3), takes the tram as well as trains and buses (Chapter 4), visits Irish pubs (Chapter 5), Italian restaurants (Chapter 6), a block of flats (Chapter 7), an inner-city school (Chapter 8) and, finally, a city registration office (Chapter 9). In all these situations, the starting point is society and culture rather than — isolated — kinds of translating events, messages, communications, or translators, which implies from the beginning that translation is not assumed as — just — a language event. It is in the dynamics of communities, communication, and discourse that translation takes shape. One of our shared observations is of course that Even-Zohar’s (1978)Even-Zohar, Itamar 1978 “The Position of Translated Literature Within the Literary Polysystem.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, 117–127. Leuven: Acco. position of translations becomes central.

While moving through his city, Flynn visits very different local corners where communication, discourse, and translation (defined in a pragmatic way) are taking place between locals and migrants (‘expats’ seem to belong to another group). Their local dynamics are by nature never identical, but schools and especially civil registration offices for non-Belgians represent a more normative status. Having experienced such environments in real life, our participant narrator keeps his initial narrative and analytical style, but he cannot help complaining at least once about “O God, the poor man” (155) and noticing recent changes in policy: “no language policy without a translation policy” (128–129). His conclusions in the final, unnumbered chapter are referred to as tentative: they avoid becoming static again (like notions of source or target) and are oriented towards “forms of life and genres” (160–161).

Throughout this book, specialized readers are offered an exceptional model for the observation, description, and analysis of culture via translation. It demonstrates again how and why cultural research on translation and in TS requires open interdisciplinarity, and why starting points on the basis of static definitions are not compatible with the dynamics of the object of study. Which leads us back, among other things, to the last sentences on positions in Even-Zohar (1978)Even-Zohar, Itamar 1978 “The Position of Translated Literature Within the Literary Polysystem.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, 117–127. Leuven: Acco.. It is an open question how this kind of research about Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, or small cities on other continents might be imagined.