Is that a fish in your ear?

摘要

The title of David Bellos' book is not immediately clear to those readers who are unfamiliar with Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, in which we meet the so called 'Babel fish', which you can stick in your ear and instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. As this fish does not exist in reality, we must have translations, and David Bellos has written a text about what he calls 'the amazing adventure of translation'. An experienced, prizewinning translator himself, he is at the same time a university teacher and director of the translation programme at Princeton University. He writes about translation from a practical and a theoretical point of view, and he manages to focus on the real problems and fields of interest in the world of translation. Put in the author's own words, this is not a book about how to translate, it is the 'big picture'. The book is obviously written for the general public. It is easy to read, but it is based upon solid theory, and readers are invited to read further, guided by the references and notes accompanying each chapter.