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Introducing Translation Studies

‘Introducing Translation Studies is among the few very best textbooks on translation
studies that brings together translation theory and practice. In the book, Munday has
done a superb job in presenting the myriad of up-to-date translation theories in a concise,
lucid and interesting manner. It’s translation studies made easy, hence good for trans-
lation students, teachers, professional translators or simply anyone who wants an
introduction to the subject.’
Defeng Li, SOAS, UK

Praise for the first edition:

‘Jeremy Munday’s book responds to the challenge not only of having to provide for the
profound plurality now characteristic of the field, but also to present a snapshot of a rapidly
developing discipline in a clear, concise and graphic way. This is a book which raises strong
awareness of current issues in the field and will be of interest to translation trainers and
trainees alike.’
Basil Hatim, American University of Sharjah, UAE

An established bestselling textbook, used on translation courses and PhD programmes

worldwide, Introducing Translation Studies provides an accessible overview of the key con-
tributions to this dynamic and growing field.
In this book Munday explores each theory chapter by chapter and tests the different
approaches by applying them to texts. The texts discussed are taken from a broad range of
languages – Bengali, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese and
Spanish – and English translations are provided.
Analysing a wide variety of texts including the Bible, Beowulf, the fiction of García
Márquez and Proust, European Union and Unesco documents, films, a travel brochure, a
children’s cookery book and the translations of Harry Potter, Munday provides a balanced
introduction to the subject.
Each chapter includes a box presenting the key concepts; an introduction outlining the
translation theory or theories; illustrative texts with translations; case studies; a chapter
summary and discussion points and exercises.
New features of this second edition include:

A new chapter on translation and new technologies, focusing on audiovisual transla-

tion and also including globalization/localization and corpus-based translation studies
Revision of each chapter with new material on the development of translation theory
and practice, including cognitive translation theories and relevance theory, the histori-
ography and sociology of translation, and translation and ideology
An updated discussion on the future of translation studies
Revised exercises and fully updated further reading lists, web links and bibliography
A new companion web site.
This is a practical, user-friendly textbook which gives a comprehensive insight into transla-
tion studies.
An accompanying website can be found at: http://routledge.com/textbooks/
9780415396936

Jeremy Munday is Senior Lecturer in Spanish studies and translation at the University of
Leeds and is a freelance translator. He is author of Style and Ideology in Translation
(Routledge, 2008) and co-author, with Basil Hatim, of Translation: An Advanced Resource
Book (Routledge, 2004).
Introducing Translation
Studies
Theories and applications
Second Edition

JEREMY MUNDAY
First edition published 2001
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Second edition published 2008
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2001, 2008 Jeremy Munday

The right of Jeremy Munday to be identified as the Author
of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-86973-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–39694–8 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–39693–x (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–39694–3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–39693–6 (pbk)
Para Cristina,
que me ha hecho feliz
Contents

List of figures and tables xi

Acknowledgements xiii
List of abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Main issues of translation studies 4

1.1 The concept of translation 4
1.2 What is translation studies? 5
1.3 A brief history of the discipline 7
1.4 The Holmes/Toury ‘map’ 9
1.5 Developments since the 1970s 13
1.6 Aim of this book and a guide to chapters 15

Chapter 2 Translation theory before the twentieth century 18

2.0 Introduction 19
2.1 ‘Word-for-word’ or ‘sense-for-sense’? 19
2.2 Martin Luther 23
2.3 Faithfulness, spirit and truth 24
2.4 Early attempts at systematic translation theory: Dryden, Dolet
and Tytler 25
2.5 Schleiermacher and the valorization of the foreign 28
2.6 Translation theory of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in Britain 29
2.7 Towards contemporary translation theory 30

Chapter 3 Equivalence and equivalent effect 36

3.0 Introduction 36
3.1 Roman Jakobson: the nature of linguistic meaning and
equivalence 37
3.2 Nida and ‘the science of translating’ 38
3.3 Newmark: semantic and communicative translation 44
3.4 Koller: Korrespondenz and Äquivalenz 46
3.5 Later developments in equivalence 48
VIII CONTENTS

Chapter 4 Studying translation product and process 55

4.0 Introduction 56
4.1 Vinay and Darbelnet’s model 56
4.2 Catford and translation ‘shifts’ 60
4.3 Czech writing on translation shifts 61
4.4 The cognitive process of translation 63

Chapter 5 Functional theories of translation 71

5.0 Introduction 72
5.1 Text type 72
5.2 Translatorial action 77
5.3 Skopos theory 79
5.4 Translation-oriented text analysis 82

Chapter 6 Discourse and register analysis approaches 89

6.0 Introduction 89
6.1 The Hallidayan model of language and discourse 90
6.2 House’s model of translation quality assessment 91
6.3 Baker’s text and pragmatic level analysis: a coursebook for
translators 94
6.4 Hatim and Mason: the semiotic level of context and discourse 98
6.5 Criticisms of discourse and register analysis approaches to
translation 100

Chapter 7 Systems theories 107

7.0 Introduction 107
7.1 Polysystem theory 108
7.2 Toury and descriptive translation studies 110
7.3 Chesterman’s translation norms 117
7.4 Other models of descriptive translation studies: Lambert and
van Gorp and the Manipulation School 118

Chapter 8 Cultural and ideological turns 124

8.0 Introduction 124
8.1 Translation as rewriting 125
8.2 Translation and gender 128
8.3 Postcolonial translation theory 131
8.4 The ideologies of the theorists 135
8.5 Other perspectives on translation and ideology 136

Chapter 9 The role of the translator: visibility, ethics and sociology 142
9.0 Introduction 143
9.1 The cultural and political agenda of translation 143
9.2 The position and positionality of the literary translator 149
9.3 The power network of the publishing industry 151
9.4 Discussion of Venuti’s work 152
 CONTENTS IX

9.5 The reception and reviewing of translations 154

9.6 The sociology and historiography of translation 157

Chapter 10 Philosophical theories of translation 162

10.0 Introduction 162
10.1 Steiner’s hermeneutic motion 163
10.2 Ezra Pound and the energy of language 167
10.3 The task of the translator: Walter Benjamin 169
10.4 Deconstruction 170

Chapter 11 New directions from the new media 179

11.0 Introduction 179
11.1 Corpus-based translation studies 180
11.2 Audiovisual translation 182
11.3 Localization and globalization 191

Chapter 12 Concluding remarks 197

Appendix: internet links 200

Notes 202
Bibliography 208
Index 226
List of figures and tables

Figures

1.1 Holmes’s ‘map’ of translation studies 10

1.2 The applied branch of translation studies 12
3.1 Nida’s three-stage system of translation 40
5.1 Reiss’s text types and text varieties 73
5.2 Text type and relevant criteria for translation 76
6.1 Relation of genre and register to language 90
6.2 Scheme for analysing and comparing original and translation texts 92
7.1 Toury’s initial norm and the continuum of adequate and acceptable translation 113
7.2 Preliminary norms 113
7.3 Operational norms 113

Tables

3.1 Comparison of Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation 45

3.2 Differentiation of equivalence and correspondence 47
3.3 Characteristics of research foci for different equivalence types 48
4.1 Segmentation of text into units of translation 66
5.1 Functional characteristics of text types and links to translation methods 73
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following copyright holders for giving permission to reproduce the
following: Figure 1.1, reproduced from G. Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies – And
Beyond, copyright 1995, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Figure 3.1,
reproduced from E. Nida and C. R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation, copyright
1969, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Figure 5.1, reproduced from A. Chesterman (ed.), Readings in
Translation Theory, copyright 1989, Helsinki: Finn Lectura; based on a handout prepared by
Roland Freihoff; permission kindly granted by the author. Figure 5.2, reproduced from M.
Snell-Hornby, Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach, copyright 1995, Amsterdam
and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Figure 6.2, reproduced from J. House, Translation
Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited, copyright 1997, Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Table 5.1,
translated and adapted from K. Reiss, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik;
the original is copyright of K. Reiss.
The case study in Chapter 8 is a revised and abridged version of an article of mine:
‘The Caribbean conquers the world? An analysis of the reception of García Márquez in
translation’, published in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 75.1: 137–44.
In the first edition, I indicated my sincere debt to Lawrence Venuti (Temple University,
USA) for his encouragement with this project and for his detailed comments and sugges-
tions on earlier drafts. I again acknowledge this debt, although I did not call on his advice for
the changes made to the second edition.
My thanks also go to Rana Nayar (Reader, Department of English at Panjab University,
Chandigarh, India) for his assistance with the case study in Chapter 9. I also thank col-
leagues at the Universities of Leeds, Surrey and Bradford for their support during the
writing of the first and second editions this book, and to my students at all those institutions
who have responded to versions of this material. My thanks also to all who have contacted
me with comments on the first edition with suggestions for revision (including John Denton,
Gerhard Heupel, David Large and Anita Weston), to those journal reviewers who have made
constructive suggestions and to the anonymous reviewers of the proposal for this second
edition. There are many other translation studies colleagues who have offered suggestions
and help in many ways; I thank them all.
I would also like to express my extreme gratitude to Louisa Semlyen, Nadia Seemungal
and Ursula Mellows at Routledge, who have been very supportive and patient throughout
the writing and editing process. Also to copy-editor Rosemary Morlin and proofreader Mary
Dalton for their careful attention to detail. Any remaining errors are of course mine alone.
Finally, but most of all, my thanks to Cristina, whose love and help have meant so much
to me, and to Nuria and Marina, who have added so much to my life.
Jeremy Munday
London, November 2007
List of abbreviations

BCE Before Common Era

CE Common Era
DTS descriptive translation studies
SL source language
ST source text
TL target language
TT target text
Introduction

Translation studies is the academic discipline related to the study of the theory and
phenomena of translation. By its nature it is multilingual and also interdisciplinary,
encompassing any language combinations, various branches of linguistics, comparative
literature, communication studies, philosophy and a range of types of cultural studies
including postcolonialism and postmodernism as well as sociology and historiography.
Because of this diversity, one of the biggest problems in teaching and learning about
translation studies is that much of it is dispersed across such a wide range of books
and journals. Hence there have been a number of ‘readers’ of key writings on the subject;
these include Hans-Joachim Störig’s Das Problem des Übersetzens (1963), Andrew
Chesterman’s Readings in Translation Theory (1989), André Lefevere’s Translation/
History/Culture: A Sourcebook (1992b), Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet’s Theories of
Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (1992), Douglas Robinson’s
Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997b) and Lawrence Venuti’s
The Translation Studies Reader (2000, 2nd edition 2004). Others, such as The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker 1998), An Encyclopedia of Translation (Chan
and Pollard 1995) and The Dictionary of Translation Studies (Shuttleworth and Cowie
1997), have attempted to bring together the main concepts and give a description of the
field. Surveys in other languages include, in Spanish, Hurtado Albir (2001), in German,
Snell-Hornby et al. (1999) and Stolze (2001) and the multilingual ‘handbook’ by Mouton de
Gruyter, the first volume of which was published in 2004 (Kittel et al. 2004).
The first edition of Introducing Translation Studies (2001) presented a practical intro-
duction to an already diverse field. This second edition is fully revised but has the same
aim, setting out to give a critical but balanced survey of many of the most important trends
and contributions to translation studies in a single volume, written in an accessible style.
The different contemporary models are applied to illustrative texts in brief case studies
so that the reader can see them in operation. The new research contained in these
case studies, together with the ‘discussion and research points’ sections, is designed to
encourage further exploration and understanding of translation issues.
This new edition follows the basic structure of the earlier edition but fully updates
references, includes a description of important new material throughout: for instance,
more material on historical sources, especially China, in Chapter 2, some consideration of
cognitive theories in Chapter 4, an update on ‘translation universals’ in Chapter 7, and the
addition of new work on ethics, ideology, sociology, historiography and the translation of
gay texts in Chapters 8 and 9. Some of the material from the original final chapter on
interdisciplinarity has been incorporated into Chapter 1 and a new final chapter discusses
how the pace of new technologies is presenting new challenges and opening up new fields
2 INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

to translation studies. The focus in this last chapter is on audiovisual translation, localization
and corpus linguistics.
The book is designed to serve as a coursebook for undergraduate and postgraduate
translation, translation studies and translation theory, and also as a solid theoretical intro-
duction to students, researchers, instructors and professional translators. The aim is to
enable the readers to develop their understanding of the issues and associated meta-
language, and to begin to apply the models themselves. It is also hoped that a closer
examination of specific issues and further reading in those areas that are of greatest
interest to the individual student will be encouraged. In this way, the book may provide a
stimulating introduction to a range of theoretical approaches to translation that are relevant
both for those engaged in the academic study of translation and for the professional
linguist.
Each of the chapters surveys a major area of the discipline. Each is designed to be
self-standing, so that readers with a specific focus can quickly find the descriptions that are
of most interest to them. However, conceptual links between chapters are cross-referenced
and the book has been structured so that it can function as a coursebook in translation,
translation studies and translation theory. There are eleven chapters, each of which might
be covered in one or two weeks, depending on the length of the course, to fit into a
semesterized system. The discussion and research points additionally provide substantial
initial material for students to begin to develop their own research. The progression of ideas
is also from the introductory (presenting the main issues of translation studies in Chapter 1)
to the more complex, as the students become more accustomed to the terminology and
concepts. In general, the progression is chronological, from pre-twentieth-century theory
in Chapter 2 to linguistic-oriented theories (Chapters 3–6 passim) and to more recent
developments from cultural studies such as postcolonialism (Chapter 8). But it is also
conceptual, since some of the earlier theories and concepts, such as equivalence and
universals of translation, are constantly being revisited.
Clarity has been a major consideration, so each chapter follows a similar format of:

an introductory table clearly presenting key terms and ideas;

the main text, describing in detail the models and issues under discussion;
an illustrative case study, which applies and evaluates the main model of the chapter;
suggestions for further reading;
a brief evaluative summary of the chapter;
a series of discussion and research points to stimulate further thought and research.

The readers listed above were necessarily selective, and this volume is no different. The
theorists and models covered have been chosen because of their strong influence on
translation studies and because they are particularly representative of the approaches in
each chapter. Exclusion of much other worthy material has been due to space constraints
and the focus of the book, which is to give a clear introduction to a number of theoretical
approaches. Over recent years, and since the publication of the first edition, the field has
continued to grow with a considerable increase in the number of publications (monographs,
edited volumes, journals, online publications) and the borrowing of concepts from new
fields such as cognitive studies, sociology, literary theory and corpus linguistics). It is not
practicable, and indeed would be impossible, to attempt to be fully comprehensive. I am also
aware that the organization of the book inevitably gives preference to those theorists who
 INTRODUCTION 3

have advanced major new ideas and gives less than sufficient due to the many scholars
who work in the field producing detailed case studies or less high-profile work.
For these reasons, detailed suggestions are given for further reading. These are
designed to encourage students to go to the primary texts, to follow up ideas that have
been raised in each chapter and to investigate the research that is being carried out in their
own countries and languages. In this way, the book should ideally be used in conjunction
with the readers mentioned above and be supported by an institution’s library resources.
An attempt has also been made to refer to many works that are readily available, either in
recent editions or reprinted in one of the anthologies. A comprehensive bibliography is
provided at the end of the book, together with a brief list of useful websites, where up-to-
date information on translation studies conferences, publications and organizations is
to be found. In addition, since this is a rapidly changing and expanding field, the intention
is for some additional material to be available on the Routledge website (see http://
www.routledge.com/textbooks/its.html), including periodic updates of new works that are
published. The emphasis is on encouraging reflection, investigation and awareness of the
new discipline, and on applying the theory to both practice and research.
A major issue has been the choice of languages for the texts used in the illustrative
case studies. There are examples or texts from English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese
and Spanish. Some additional examples are given from Bengali, Dutch, Punjabi and
Russian. Yet the case studies are written in such a way as to focus on the theoretical issues
and should not exclude those unfamiliar with the specific language pairs. A range of text
types is offered, including the Bible, Beowulf, the fiction of García Márquez and Proust,
European Union and Unesco documents, a travel brochure, a children’s cookery book, the
translations of Harry Potter and subtitled films from Bengali, French and German.
Above all, my hope is that this book will contribute to the continued development of
translation studies by helping and encouraging readers old and new to the field to pursue
their interest in this dynamic discipline.
CHAPTER 1

Main issues of translation studies

Key concepts
The practice of translating is long established, but the discipline of
translation studies is new.
In academic circles, translation was previously relegated to just a
language-learning activity.
A split has persisted between translation practice and theory.
The study of (usually literary) translation began through comparative
literature, translation ‘workshops’ and contrastive analysis.
James S. Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation studies’ is
considered to be the ‘founding statement’ of a new discipline.
Translation studies has expanded hugely, and is now often considered
an interdiscipline.

Key texts
Chesterman, A. (2002) ‘On the interdisciplinarity of translation studies’, Logos 3.1: 1–9.
Ferreira Duarte, J., A. Assis Rosa and T. Seruya (eds) (2006) Translation Studies at
the Interface of Disciplines, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gile, D. (2004) ‘Translation research versus interpreting research: kinship, differences and
prospects for partnership’, in Christina Schäffner (ed.), pp. 10–34.
Holmes, J. S. (1988b/2004) ‘The name and nature of translation studies’, in L. Venuti
(ed.) (2004), pp. 180–92.
Jakobson, R. (1959/2004) ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, in L. Venuti (ed.) (2004),
pp. 138–43.
Snell-Hornby, M. (2006) The Turns of Translation Studies, Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, Chapter 1.

1.1 THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION

The main aim of this book is to introduce the reader to major concepts and models of
translation studies. Because of the rapid growth in the area, particularly over the last
decade, difficult decisions have had to be taken regarding the selection of material. We
have decided, for reasons of space and consistency of approach, to focus on written
 MAIN ISSUES 5

translation rather than oral translation (the latter is commonly known as interpreting or
interpretation), although the overlaps make a clear distinction impossible (cf. Gile 2004).
The term translation itself has several meanings: it can refer to the general subject
field, the product (the text that has been translated) or the process (the act of producing
the translation, otherwise known as translating). The process of translation between
two different written languages involves the translator changing an original written text (the
source text or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a
written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or
TL). This type corresponds to ‘interlingual translation’ and is one of the three categories of
translation described by the Russo-American structuralist Roman Jakobson in his seminal
paper ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’ (Jakobson 1959/2004: 139). Jakobson’s
categories are as follows:

(1) intralingual translation, or ‘rewording’: ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of

other signs of the same language’;
(2) interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper’: ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of some other language’;
(3) intersemiotic translation, or ‘transmutation’: ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of signs of non-verbal sign systems’.

Intralingual translation would occur, for example, when we rephrase an expression or when
we summarize or otherwise rewrite a text in the same language. Intersemiotic translation
would occur if a written text were translated, for example, into music, film or painting. It is
interlingual translation, between two different verbal languages, which is the traditional,
although by no means exclusive, focus of translation studies. As we shall see as the book
progresses, notably in Chapters 8 to 10, the very notion of ‘translation proper’ and of the
stability of source and target has now been challenged and the question of what we
mean by ‘translation’, and how it differs from ‘adaptation’, ‘version’, etc., is a real one.
Thus, whereas Sandra Halverson (1999) claims that translation can be considered as a
prototype classification (i.e. that there are basic core features that we associate with
a prototypical translation, and other translational forms which lie on the periphery),
Anthony Pym (2004a: 52) sees clear ‘discontinuities’ in certain new modes, such as
translation-localization. Much of the ‘theory’ is also from a western perspective; in contrast,
Maria Tymoczko (2005, 2006) discusses the very different words and metaphors for ‘trans-
lation’ in other cultures, indicative of a conceptual orientation and where the goal of close
lexical fidelity to an original may not therefore be shared, certainly in the practice of transla-
tion of sacred and literary texts. For instance, in India there is ‘rupantar’ (= ‘change of form’)
and ‘anuvad’ (= ‘speaking after’, ‘following’), in the Arab world ‘tarjama’ (= ‘biography’) and in
China ‘fan yi’ (= ‘turning over’) (see also, Ramakrishna 2000, Trivedi 2006).

1.2 WHAT IS TRANSLATION STUDIES?

Throughout history, written and spoken translations have played a crucial role in interhuman
communication, not least in providing access to important texts for scholarship and religious
purposes. Yet the study of translation as an academic subject has only really begun in the
past sixty years. In the English-speaking world, this discipline is now generally known as
6 INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

‘translation studies’, thanks to the Dutch-based US scholar James S. Holmes. In his key
defining paper delivered in 1972, but not widely available until 1988, Holmes describes the
then nascent discipline as being concerned with ‘the complex of problems clustered round
the phenomenon of translating and translations’ (Holmes 1988b/2004: 181). By 1988,
Mary Snell-Hornby, in the first edition of her Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach,
was writing that ‘the demand that translation studies should be viewed as an independent
discipline . . . has come from several quarters in recent years’ (Snell-Hornby 1988, preface).
By 1995, the time of the second, revised, edition of her work, Snell-Hornby is able to talk in
the preface of ‘the breathtaking development of translation studies as an independent
discipline’ and the ‘prolific international discussion’ on the subject (Snell-Hornby 1995
preface). Mona Baker, in her introduction to the first edition of The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Translation (1998), talked effusively of the richness of the ‘exciting new discipline,
perhaps the discipline of the 1990s’, bringing together scholars from a wide variety of often
more traditional disciplines.
There are two very visible ways in which translation studies has become more
prominent. First, there has been a proliferation of specialized translating and inter-
preting courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. These courses, which
attract thousands of students, are mainly oriented towards training future professional
commercial translators and interpreters and serve as highly valued entry-level qualifications
for the translating and interpreting professions. Caminade and Pym (1995) listed at least
250 university-level bodies in over sixty countries offering four-year undergraduate
degrees and/or postgraduate courses in translation. The number has continued to grow.
Take the example of the UK, where the study of modern languages at university has been in
decline but where the story particularly of postgraduate courses in interpreting and translat-
ing, the first of which were set up in the 1960s, is very different. At the time of the first
edition of this book, there were at least twenty postgraduate translation courses in the UK
and several designated ‘Centres for Translation Studies’. By 2007–8, the keyword search
‘translation’ revealed over twenty institutions offering a combined total of 135 MA pro-
grammes, even if translation was not necessarily central to all.1
Other courses, in smaller numbers, focus on the practice of literary translation. In the
UK, these include major courses at Middlesex University and the University of East Anglia
(Norwich), the latter of which also houses the British Centre for Literary Translation. In
Europe, there is now a network of centres where literary translation is studied, practised
and promoted. Apart from Norwich, these include Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Arles
(France), Bratislava (Slovakia), Monaghan (Ireland), Rhodes (Greece), Sineffe (Belgium),
Strälen (Germany), Tarazona (Spain) and Visby (Sweden).
The past two decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books and
journals on translation in many languages. Longer-standing international translation
studies journals such as Babel (the Netherlands) and Meta (Canada), which recently
celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, were joined by TTR (Canada) in 1988, Target (the
Netherlands) in 1989, and The Translator (UK) in 1995 as well as by numerous others
including Across Languages and Cultures (Hungary), Cadernos de Tradução (Brazil),
Translation and Literature (UK), Perspectives (Denmark), Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica
della Traduzione (Italy), Translation Studies (UK), Turjuman (Morocco) and the Spanish
Hermeneus, Livius and Sendebar. Online accessibility is increasing the profile of certain
publications: thus, the entire contents of Meta are available online, issues of Babel and
Target from 2000 onwards are viewable by subscription and we now see the appearance of
 MAIN ISSUES 7

fully online journals such as The Journal of Specialized Translation and New Voices (see
Appendix). In addition, there is a whole host of other single-language, modern languages,
applied linguistics, comparative literature and other journals whose primary focus may not
be translation but where articles on translation are often published. The new- and backlists
of European publishers such as Continuum, John Benjamins, Multilingual Matters, Rodopi,
Routledge and St Jerome now contain considerable numbers of books in the field of
translation studies, as is attested by the searchable online bibliographies Translation
Studies bibliography (John Benjamins) and Translation Studies abstracts (St Jerome)
(see Appendix). In addition, there are various professional publications dedicated to the
practice of translation. In the UK these include The Linguist of the Chartered Institute of
Linguists, The ITI Bulletin of the Institute for Translating and Interpreting and In Other
Words, the literary-oriented publication of the Translators Association.
International organizations have also prospered. The Fédération Internationale des
Traducteurs, established in 1953 by the Société française des traducteurs and its president
Pierre-François Caillé, brought together national associations of translators. In more recent
years, translation studies scholars have banded together nationally and internationally in
bodies such as the Canadian Association for Translation Studies/Association canadienne de
traductologie (founded in Ottawa in 1987), the European Society for Translation Studies
(Vienna, 1992), the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (Cardiff, 1995)
and the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (Korea, 2004).
International conferences on a wide variety of themes are held in an increasing number of
countries, and there has been a dramatic increase in activity in China, India, the Arab world,
South Africa, Spain, Greece and Italy, amongst others. From being a little-established field a
relatively short time ago, translation studies has now become one of the most active and
dynamic new areas of research encompassing an exciting mix of approaches.
This chapter sets out to examine what exactly is understood by this fast-growing field
and briefly describes the history and aims of the discipline.

1.3 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE

Writings on the subject of translating go far back in recorded history. The practice of
translation was discussed by, for example, Cicero and Horace (first century BCE) and
St Jerome (fourth century CE); as we shall see in Chapter 2, their writings were to exert an
important influence up until the twentieth century. In St Jerome’s case, his approach to
translating the Greek Septuagint into Latin would affect later translations of the Scriptures.
Indeed, in western Europe the translation of the Bible was to be – for well over a thousand
years and especially during the Reformation in the sixteenth century – the battleground
of conflicting ideologies. In China, it was the translation of the Buddhist sutras that
inaugurated a long discussion on translation practice from the first century CE.
However, although the practice of translating is long established, the study of the field
developed into an academic discipline only in the second half of the twentieth century.
Before that, translation had normally been merely an element of language learning in
modern language courses. In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s, language
learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be dominated by what was
known as the grammar-translation method. This method, which was applied to classical
Latin and Greek and then to modern foreign languages, centred on the rote study of the
8 INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

grammatical rules and structures of the foreign language. These rules were both practised
and tested by the translation of a series of usually unconnected and artificially constructed
sentences exemplifying the structure(s) being studied, an approach that persists even
nowadays in certain countries and contexts. Typical of this is the following rather bizarre
and decontextualized collection of sentences to translate into Spanish, for the practice of
Spanish tense use. They appear in K. Mason’s Advanced Spanish Course, still to be found
on some secondary school courses in the UK:

(1) The castle stood out against the cloudless sky.

(2) The peasants enjoyed their weekly visits to the market.
(3) She usually dusted the bedrooms after breakfast.
(4) Mrs Evans taught French at the local grammar school.
(Mason 1969/74: 92)

The gearing of translation to language teaching and learning may partly explain why
academia considered it to be of secondary status. Translation exercises were regarded as a
means of learning a new language or of reading a foreign language text until one had the
linguistic ability to read the original. Study of a work in translation was generally frowned
upon once the student had acquired the necessary skills to read the original. However,
the grammar-translation method fell into increasing disrepute, particularly in many English-
language countries, with the rise of the direct method or communicative approach to
English language teaching in the 1960s and 1970s. This approach placed stress on stu-
dents’ natural capacity to learn language and attempts to replicate ‘authentic’ language
learning conditions in the classroom. It often privileged spoken over written forms, at
least initially, and shunned the use of the students’ mother tongue. This focus led to the
abandoning of translation in language learning. As far as teaching was concerned, trans-
lation then tended to become restricted to higher-level and university language courses
and professional translator training, to the extent that present first-year undergraduates in
the UK are unlikely to have had any real practice in the skill.
In the USA, translation – specifically literary translation – was promoted in universities
in the 1960s by the translation workshop concept. Based on I. A. Richards’s reading
workshops and practical criticism approach that began in the 1920s and in other later
creative writing workshops, these translation workshops were first established in the uni-
versities of Iowa and Princeton. They were intended as a platform for the introduction of
new translations into the target culture and for the discussion of the finer principles of the
translation process and of understanding a text (for further discussion of this background,
see Gentzler 2001: Chapter 2). Running parallel to this approach was that of comparative
literature, where literature is studied and compared transnationally and transculturally,
necessitating the reading of some literature in translation.
Another area in which translation became the subject of research was contrastive
analysis. This is the study of two languages in contrast in an attempt to identify general
and specific differences between them. It developed into a systematic area of research in
the USA from the 1930s onwards and came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. Trans-
lations and translated examples provided much of the data in these studies (e.g. Di Pietro
1971, James 1980). The contrastive approach heavily influenced other studies, such
as Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) and Catford’s (1965), which overtly stated their aim of
assisting translation research. Although useful, contrastive analysis does not, however,
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kills whom? Frankly, I'm going to send you to prison if I can. Unlawful
colonization is very bad business. But I suppose you feel that you
have to do something permanent about me. In your place I probably
should, too. Shall we declare a truce?"
Huyghens indicated indifference. Roane said vexedly:
"Then I do! I have to! So—"
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and put a pocket blaster on the
table. He leaned back, defiantly.
"Keep it," said Huyghens. "Loren Two isn't a place where you live
long unarmed." He turned to a cupboard. "Hungry?"
"I could eat," admitted Roane.

Huyghens pulled out two meal-packs from the cupboard and inserted
them in the readier below. He set out plates.
"Now—what happened to the official, licensed, authorized colony
here?" asked Roane briskly. "License issued eighteen months ago.
There was a landing of colonists with a drone fleet of equipment and
supplies. There've been four ship-contacts since. There should be
several thousand robots being industrious under adequate human
supervision. There should be a hundred-mile-square clearing, planted
with food plants for later human arrivals. There should be a landing
grid at least half-finished. Obviously there should be a space beacon
to guide ships to a landing. There isn't. There's no clearing visible
from space. That Crete Line ship has been in orbit for three days,
trying to find a place to drop me. Her skipper was fuming. Your
beacon is the only one on the planet, and we found it by accident.
What happened?"
Huyghens served the food. He said dryly:
"There could be a hundred colonies on this planet without any one
knowing of any other. I can only guess about your robots, but I
suspect they ran into sphexes."
Roane paused, with his fork in his hand.
"I read up on this planet, since I was to report on its colony. A sphex
is part of the inimical animal life here. Cold-blooded belligerent
carnivor, not a lizard but a genus all its own. Hunts in packs. Seven to
eight hundred pounds, when adult. Lethally dangerous and simply too
numerous to fight. They're why no license was ever granted to human
colonists. Only robots could work here, because they're machines.
What animal attacks machines?"
Huyghens said:
"What machine attacks animals? The sphexes wouldn't bother robots,
of course, but would robots bother the sphexes?"
Roane chewed and swallowed.
"Hold it! I'll agree that you can't make a hunting-robot. A machine can
discriminate, but it can't decide. That's why there's no danger of a
robot revolt. They can't decide to do something for which they have
no instructions. But this colony was planned with full knowledge of
what robots can and can't do. As ground was cleared, it was enclosed
in an electric fence which no sphex could touch without frying."
Huyghens thoughtfully cut his food. After a moment:
"The landing was in the winter-time," he observed. "It must have
been, because the colony survived a while. And at a guess, the last
ship-landing was before thaw. The years are eighteen months long
here, you know."
Roane admitted:
"It was in winter that the landing was made. And the last ship-landing
was before spring. The idea was to get mines in operation for
material, and to have ground cleared and enclosed in sphex-proof
fence before the sphexes came back from the tropics. They winter
there, I understand."
"Did you ever see a sphex?" Huyghens asked. Then added, "No, of
course not. But if you took a spitting cobra and crossed it with a
wildcat, painted it tan-and-blue and then gave it hydrophobia and
homicidal mania at once—why you might have one sphex. But not
the race of sphexes. They can climb trees, by the way. A fence
wouldn't stop them."
"An electrified fence," said Roane. "Nothing could climb that!"
"No one animal," Huyghens told him. "But sphexes are a race. The
smell of one dead sphex brings others running with blood in their
eyes. Leave a dead sphex alone for six hours and you've got them
around by the dozen. Two days and there are hundreds. Longer, and
you've got thousands of them! They gather to caterwaul over their
dead pal and hunt for whoever or whatever killed him."
He returned to his meal. A moment later he said:
"No need to wonder what happened to your colony. During the winter
the robots burned out a clearing and put up an electrified fence
according to the book. Come spring, the sphexes came back. They're
curious, among their other madnesses. A sphex would try to climb the
fence just to see what was behind it. He'd be electrocuted. His
carcass would bring others, raging because a sphex was dead. Some
of them would try to climb the fence—and die. And their corpses
would bring others. Presently the fence would break down from the
bodies hanging on it, or a bridge of dead beasts' carcasses would be
built across it—and from as far down-wind as the scent carried
there'd be loping, raging, scent-crazed sphexes racing to the spot.
They'd pour into the clearing through or over the fence, squalling and
screeching for something to kill. I think they'd find it."
Roane ceased to eat. He looked sick.
"There were ... pictures of sphexes in the data I read. I suppose that
would account for ... everything."
He tried to lift his fork. He put it down again.
"I can't eat," he said abruptly.
Huyghens made no comment. He finished his own meal, scowling.
He rose and put the plates into the top of the cleaner. There was a
whirring. He took them out of the bottom and put them away.
"Let me see those reports, eh?" he asked dourly. "I'd like to see what
sort of a set-up they had—those robots."
Roane hesitated and then opened his traveling bag. There was a
micro-viewer and reels of films. One entire reel was labeled
"Specifications for Construction, Colonial Survey," which would
contain detailed plans and all requirements of material and
workmanship for everything from desks, office, administrative
personnel, for use of, to landing grids, heavy-gravity planets, lift-
capacity one hundred thousand Earth-tons. But Huyghens found
another. He inserted it and spun the control swiftly here and there,
pausing only briefly at index frames until he came to the section he
wanted. He began to study the information with growing impatience.
"Robots, robots, robots!" he snapped. "Why don't they leave them
where they belong—in cities to do the dirty work, and on airless
planets where nothing unexpected ever happens! Robots don't
belong in new colonies! Your colonists depended on them for
defense! Dammit, let a man work with robots long enough and he
thinks all nature is as limited as they are! This is a plan to set up a
controlled environment! On Loren Two! Controlled environment—" He
swore, luridly. "Complacent, idiotic, desk-bound half-wits!"
"Robots are all right," said Roane. "We couldn't run civilization without
them."
"But you can't tame a wilderness with 'em!" snapped Roane. "You had
a dozen men landed, with fifty assembled robots to start with. There
were parts for fifteen hundred more—and I'll bet anything I've got that
the ship-contacts landed more still."
"They did," admitted Roane.
"I despise 'em," growled Huyghens. "I feel about 'em the way the old
Greeks and Romans felt about slaves. They're for menial work—the
sort of work a man will perform for himself, but that he won't do for
another man for pay. Degrading work!"
"Quite aristocratic!" said Roane with a touch of irony. "I take it that
robots clean out the bear quarters downstairs."
"No!" snapped Huyghens. "I do! They're my friends! They fight for me!
They can't understand the necessity and no robot would do the job
right!"
He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ
tones and hiccupings and the sound of tack-hammers and slamming
doors. Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the
discordant squeaking of a rusty pump.
"I'm looking," said Huyghens at the micro-viewer, "for the record of
their mining operations. An open-pit operation wouldn't mean a thing.
But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising
the robots when the colony was wiped out, there's an off-chance he
survived a while."
Roane regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.
"And—"
"Dammit," snapped Roane, "if so I'll go see! He'd ... they'd have no
chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case!"
Roane raised his eyebrows.
"I'm a Colonial Survey officer," he said. "I've told you I'll send you to
prison if I can. You've risked the lives of millions of people,
maintaining non-quarantined communication with an unlicensed
planet. If you did rescue somebody from the ruins of the robot colony,
does it occur to you that they'd be witnesses to your unauthorized
presence here?"
Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped. He switched back and
forth and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: "They
did run a tunnel!" Aloud he said, "I'll worry about witnesses when I
have to."

He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were the odds and
ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he
never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires,
transistors, bolts, and similar stray items that a man living alone will
need. When to his knowledge he's the only inhabitant of a solar
system, he especially needs such things.
"What now?" asked Roane mildly.
"I'm going to try to find out if there's anybody left alive over there. I'd
have checked before if I'd known the colony existed. I can't prove
they're all dead, but I may prove that somebody's still alive. It's barely
two weeks' journey away from here! Odd that two colonies picked
spots so near!"
He absorbedly picked over the oddments he'd selected. Roane said
vexedly:
"Confound it! How can you check whether somebody's alive some
hundreds of miles away—when you didn't know he existed half an
hour ago?"
Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall panel, exposing
electronic apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.
"Ever think about hunting for a castaway?" he asked over his
shoulder. "There's a planet with some tens of millions of square miles
on it. You know there's a ship down. You've no idea where. You
assume the survivors have power—no civilized man will be without
power very long, so long as he can smelt metals!—but making a
space beacon calls for high-precision measurements and
workmanship. It's not to be improvised. So what will your shipwrecked
civilized man do, to guide a rescue ship to the one or two square
miles he occupies among some tens of millions on the planet?"
Roane fretted visibly.
"What?"
"He's had to go primitive, to begin with," Roane explained. "He cooks
his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly primitive
signal. It's all he can do without gauges and micrometers and very
special tools. But he can fill all the planet's atmosphere with a signal
that searchers for him can't miss. You see?"
Roane thought irritably. He shook his head.
"He'll make," said Huyghens, "a spark transmitter. He'll fix its output at
the shortest frequency he can contrive—it'll be somewhere in the five-
to-fifty-meter wave-band, but it will tune very broad—and it will be a
plainly human signal. He'll start it broadcasting. Some of those
frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any
ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get a fix
on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where the
castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping
whatever sort of drink he's improvised out of the local vegetation."
Roane said grudgingly:
"Now that you mention it, of course—"
"My space phone picks up microwaves," said Huyghens, "I'm shifting
a few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won't be efficient,
but it will pick up a distress signal if one's in the air. I don't expect it,
though."

He worked. Roane sat still a long time, watching him. Down below, a
rhythmic sort of sound arose. It was Sourdough Charley, snoring. He
lay on his back with his legs in the air. He'd discovered that he slept
cooler that way. Sitka Pete grunted in his sleep. He was dreaming. In
the general room of the station Semper, the eagle, blinked his eyes
rapidly and then tucked his head under a gigantic wing and went to
sleep. The noises of the Loren Two jungle came through the steel-
shuttered windows. The nearer moon—which had passed overhead
not long before the ringing of the arrival bell—again came soaring
over the eastern horizon. It sped across the sky at the apparent
speed of an atmosphere-flier. Overhead, it could be seen to be a
jagged irregular mass of rock or metal, plunging blindly about the
great planet forever.
Inside the station, Roane said angrily:
"See here, Huyghens! You've reason to kill me. Apparently you don't
intend to. You've excellent reason to leave that robot colony strictly
alone. But you're preparing to help, if there's anybody alive to need it.
And yet you're a criminal—and I mean a criminal! There've been
some ghastly bacteria exported from planets like Loren Two! There've
been plenty of lives lost in consequence, and you're risking more!
Why do you do it? Why do you do something that could produce
monstrous results to other beings?"
Huyghens grunted.
"You're only assuming there are no sanitary and quarantine
precautions taken in my communications. As a matter of fact, there
are. They're taken, all right! As for the rest, you wouldn't understand."
"I don't understand," snapped Roane, "but that's no proof I can't! Why
are you a criminal?"
Huyghens painstakingly used a screwdriver inside the wall panel. He
delicately lifted out a small electronic assembly. He carefully began to
fit in a spaghettied new assembly with larger units.
"I'm cutting my amplification here to hell-and-gone," he observed, "but
I think it'll do. I'm doing what I'm doing," he added calmly, "I'm being a
criminal because it seems to me befitting what I think I am.
Everybody acts according to his own real notion of himself. You're a
conscientious citizen, and a loyal official, and a well-adjusted
personality. You consider yourself an intelligent rational animal. But
you don't act that way! You're reminding me of my need to shoot you
or something similar, which a merely rational animal would try to
make me forget. You happen, Roane, to be a man. So am I. But I'm
aware of it. Therefore, I deliberately do things a merely rational
animal wouldn't, because they're my notion of what a man who's
more than a rational animal should do."
He very carefully tightened one small screw after another. Roane said
annoyedly:
"Oh. Religion."
"Self-respect," corrected Huyghens. "I don't like robots. They're too
much like rational animals. A robot will do whatever it can that its
supervisor requires it to do. A merely rational animal will do whatever
it can that circumstances require it to do. I wouldn't like a robot unless
it had some idea of what was befitting it and would spit in my eye if I
tried to make it do something else. The bears downstairs, now—
They're no robots! They are loyal and honorable beasts, but they'd
turn and tear me to bits if I tried to make them do something against
their nature. Faro Nell would fight me and all creation together, if I
tried to harm Nugget. It would be unintelligent and unreasonable and
irrational. She'd lose out and get killed. But I like her that way! And I'll
fight you and all creation when you make me try to do something
against my nature. I'll be stupid and unreasonable and irrational about
it." Then he grinned over his shoulder. "So will you. Only you don't
realize it."
He turned back to his task. After a moment he fitted a manual-control
knob over a shaft in his haywire assembly.

"What did somebody try to make you do?" asked Roane shrewdly.
"What was demanded of you that turned you into a criminal? What
are you in revolt against?"
Huyghens threw a switch. He began to turn the knob which controlled
the knob of his makeshift-modified receiver.
"Why," he said amusedly, "when I was young the people around me
tried to make me into a conscientious citizen and a loyal employee
and a well-adjusted personality. They tried to make me into a highly
intelligent rational animal and nothing more. The difference between
us, Roane, is that I found it out. Naturally, I rev—"
He stopped short. Faint, crackling, crisp frying sounds came from the
speaker of the space phone now modified to receive what once were
called short waves.
Huyghens listened. He cocked his head intently. He turned the knob
very, very slowly. Then Roane made an arrested gesture, to call
attention to something in the sibilant sound. Huyghens nodded. He
turned the knob again, with infinitesimal increments.
Out of the background noise came a patterned mutter. As Huyghens
shifted the tuning, it grew louder. It reached a volume where it was
unmistakable. It was a sequence of sounds like discordant buzzing.
There were three half-second buzzings with half-second pauses
between. A two-second pause. Three full-second buzzings with half-
second pauses between. Another two-second pause and three half-
second buzzings, again. Then silence for five seconds. Then the
pattern repeated.
"The devil!" said Huyghens. "That's a human signal! Mechanically
made, too! In fact, it used to be a standard distress-call. It was termed
an SOS, though I've no idea what that meant. Anyhow, somebody
must have read old-fashioned novels, some time, to know about it.
And so someone is still alive over at your licensed, but now smashed-
up, robot colony. And they're asking for help. I'd say they're likely to
need it."
He looked at Roane.
"The intelligent thing to do is sit back and wait for a ship—either of my
friends or yours. A ship can help survivors or castaways much better
than we can. A ship can even find them more easily. But maybe time
is important to the poor devils! So I'm going to take the bears and see
if I can reach them. You can wait here, if you like. What say? Travel
on Loren Two isn't a picnic! I'll be fighting nearly every foot of the way.
There's plenty of 'inimical animal life' here!"
Roane snapped angrily:
"Don't be a fool! Of course I'm coming! What do you take me for? And
two of us should have four times the chance of one!"
Huyghens grinned.
"Not quite. You forget Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley and Faro
Nell. There'll be five of us if you come, instead of four. And, of course,
Nugget has to come—and he'll be no help—but Semper may make
up for him. You won't quadruple our chances, Roane, but I'll be glad
to have you if you want to be stupid and unreasonable and not at all
rational—and come along."
 III
There was a jagged spur of stone looming precipitously over a river-
valley. A thousand feet below, a broad stream ran westward to the
sea. Twenty miles to the east, a wall of mountains rose sheer against
the sky. Its peaks seemed to blend to a remarkable evenness of
height. There was rolling, tumbled ground between for as far as the
eye could see.

A speck in the sky came swiftly downward. Great pinions spread, and
flapped, and icy eyes surveyed the rocky space. With more great
flappings, Semper the eagle came to ground. He folded his huge
wings and turned his head jerkily, his eyes unblinking. A tiny harness
held a miniature camera against his chest. He strutted over the bare
stone to the highest point. He stood there, a lonely and arrogant
figure in the vastness.
There came crashings and rustlings, and then snuffling sounds. Sitka
Pete came lumbering out into the clear space. He wore a harness
too, and a pack. The harness was complex, because it had not only
to hold a pack in normal travel, but, when he stood on his hind legs, it
must not hamper the use of his forepaws in combat.
He went cagily all over the open area. He peered over the edge of the
spur's farthest tip. He prowled to the other side and looked down. He
scouted carefully. Once he moved close to Semper and the eagle
opened his great curved beak and uttered an indignant noise. Sitka
paid no attention.
He relaxed, satisfied. He sat down untidily, his hind legs sprawling.
He wore an air approaching benevolence as he surveyed the
landscape about and below him.
More snufflings and crashings. Sourdough Charley came into view
with Huyghens and Roane behind him. Sourdough carried a pack,
too. Then there was a squealing and Nugget scurried up from the
rear, impelled by a whack from his mother. Faro Nell appeared, with
the carcass of a staglike animal lashed to her harness.
"I picked this place from a space photo," said Huyghens, "to make a
directional fix from. I'll get set up."
He swung his pack from his shoulders to the ground. He extracted an
obviously self-constructed device which he set on the ground. It had a
whip aerial, which he extended. Then he plugged in a considerable
length of flexible wire and unfolded a tiny, improvised directional
aerial with an even tinier booster at its base. Roane slipped his pack
from his shoulders and watched. Huyghens slipped headphones over
his ears. He looked up and said sharply:
"Watch the bears, Roane. The wind's blowing up the way we came.
Anything that trails us—sphexes, for example—will send its scent on
before. The bears will tell us."
He busied himself with the instruments he'd brought. He heard the
hissing, frying, background noise which could be anything at all
except a human signal. He reached out and swung the small aerial
around. Rasping, buzzing tones came in, faintly and then loudly. This
receiver, though, had been made for this particular wave band. It was
much more efficient than the modified space phone had been. It
picked up three short buzzes, three long ones, and three short ones
again. Three dots, three dashes, and three dots. Over and over
again. SOS. SOS. SOS.
Huyghens took a reading and moved the directional aerial a carefully
measured distance. He took another reading. He shifted it yet again
and again, carefully marking and measuring each spot and taking
notes of the instrument readings. When he finished, he had checked
the direction of the signal not only by loudness but by phase—he had
as accurate a fix as could possibly be had with portable apparatus.

Sourdough growled softly. Sitka Pete whiffed the air and arose from
his sitting position. Faro Nell whacked Nugget, sending him
whimpering to the farthest corner of the flea place. She stood
bristling, facing down-hill the way they'd come.
"Damn!" said Huyghens.
He got up and waved his arm at Semper, who had turned his head at
the stirrings. Semper squawked in a most un-eaglelike fashion and
dived off the spur and was immediately fighting the down-draught
beyond it. As Huyghens reached his weapon, the eagle came back
overhead. He went magnificently past, a hundred feet high, careening
and flapping in the tricky currents. He screamed, abruptly, and circled
and screamed again. Huyghens swung a tiny vision-plate from its
strap to where he could look into it. He saw, of course, what the little
camera on Semper's chest could see—reeling, swaying terrain as
Semper saw it, though without his breadth of field. There were
moving objects to be seen through the shifting trees. Their coloring
was unmistakable.
"Sphexes," said Huyghens dourly. "Eight of them. Don't look for them
to follow our track, Roane. They run parallel to a trail on either side.
That way they attack in breadth and all at once when they catch up.
And listen! The bears can handle anything they tangle with! It's our
job to pick off the loose ones! And aim for the body! The bullets
explode."
He threw off the safety of his weapon. Faro Nell, uttering thunderous
growls, went padding to a place between Sitka Pete and Sourdough.
Sitka glanced at her and made a whuffing noise, as if derisive of her
blood-curdling sounds. Sourdough grunted in a somehow solid
fashion.
He and Sitka moved farther away from Nell to either side. They would
cover a wider front.
There was no other sign of life than the shrillings of the incredibly tiny
creatures which on this planet were birds, and Faro Nell's deep-bass,
raging growls, and then the click of Roane's safety going off as he got
ready to use the weapon Huyghens had given him.
Semper screamed again, flapping low above the treetops, following
parti-colored, monstrous shapes beneath.
Eight blue-and-tan fiends came racing out of the underbrush. They
had spiny fringes, and horns, and glaring eyes, and they looked as if
they had come straight out of hell. On the instant of their appearance
they leaped, emitting squalling, spitting squeals that were like the
cries of fighting tomcats ten thousand times magnified. Huyghens'
rifle cracked, and its sound was wiped out in the louder detonation of
its bullet in sphexian flesh. A tan-and-blue monster tumbled over,
shrieking. Faro Nell charged, the very impersonation of white-hot fury.
Roane fired, and his bullet exploded against a tree. Sitka Pete
brought his massive forepaws in a clapping, monstrous ear-boxing
motion. A sphex died.
Then Roane fired again. Sourdough Charley whuffed. He fell forward
upon a spitting bi-colored fiend, rolled him over, and raked with his
hind claws. The belly-hide of the sphex was tenderer than the rest.
The creature rolled away, snapping at its own wounds. Another sphex
found itself shaken loose from the tumult about Sitka Pete. It whirled
to leap on him from behind—and Huyghens fired very coldly—and
two plunged upon Faro Nell and Roane blasted one and Faro Nell
disposed of the other in truly awesome fury. Then Sitka Pete heaved
himself erect—seeming to drip sphexes—and Sourdough waddled
over and pulled one off and killed it and went back for another. And
both rifles cracked together and there was suddenly nothing left to
fight.
The bears prowled from one to another of the corpses. Sitka Pete
rumbled and lifted up a limp head. Crash! Then another. He went
over the lot, whether or not they showed signs of life. When he had
finished, they were wholly still.
Semper came flapping down out of the sky. He had screamed and
fluttered overhead as the fight went on. Now he landed with a rush.
Huyghens went soothingly from one bear to another, calming them
with his voice. It took longest to calm Faro Nell, licking Nugget with
impassioned solicitude and growling horribly as she licked.
"Come along, now," said Huyghens, when Sitka showed signs of
intending to sit down again. "Heave these carcasses over a cliff.
Come along! Sitka! Sourdough! Hup!"
He guided them as the two big males somewhat fastidiously lifted up
the nightmarish creatures they and the guns together had killed, and
carried them to the edge of the spur of stone. They let the dead
beasts go bouncing and sliding down into the valley.
"That," said Huyghens, "is so their little pals will gather round them
and caterwaul their woe where there's no trail of ours to give them
ideas. If we'd been near a river, I'd have dumped them in to float
down-river and gather mourners wherever they stranded. Around the
station I incinerate them. If I had to leave them, I'd make tracks away.
About fifty miles upwind would be a good idea."
He opened the pack Sourdough carried and extracted giant sized
swabs and some gallons of antiseptic. He tended the three Kodiaks in
turn, swabbing not only the cuts and scratches they'd received, but
deeply soaking their fur where there could be suspicion of spilled
sphex blood.
"This antiseptic deodorizes, too," he told Roane. "Or we'd be trailed
by any sphex who passed to leeward of us. When we start off, I'll
swab the bears' paws for the same reason."
Roane was very quiet. He'd missed his first shot with a bullet-firing
weapon—a beam hasn't the stopping-power of an explosive bullet—
but he'd seemed to grow savagely angry with himself. The last few
seconds of the fight, he'd fired very deliberately and every bullet hit.
Now he said bitterly:
"If you're instructing me so I can carry on should you be killed, I doubt
that it's worth while!"
Huyghens felt in his pack and unfolded the enlargements he'd made
of the space photos of this part of the planet. He carefully oriented the
map with distant landmarks. He drew a painstakingly accurate line
across the photo.
"The SOS signal comes from somewhere close to the robot colony,"
he reported. "I think a little to the south of it. Probably from a mine
they'd opened up, on the far side—of course—of the Sere Plateau.
See how I've marked this map? Two fixes, one from the station and
one from here. I came away off-course to get a fix here so we'd have
two position-lines to the transmitter. The signal could have come from
the other side of the planet. But it doesn't."
"The odds would be astronomical against other castaways," protested
Roane.
"No-o-o-o," said Huyghens. "Ships have been coming here. To the
robot colony. One could have crashed. And I have friends, too."
He repacked his apparatus and gestured to the bears. He led them
beyond the scene of combat and very carefully swabbed off their
paws, so they could not possibly leave a trail of sphex-blood scent
behind them. He waved Semper, the eagle, aloft.
"Let's go," he told the Kodiaks. "Yonder! Hup!"

The party headed down-hill and into the jungle again. Now it was
Sourdough's turn to take the lead, and Sitka Pete prowled more
widely behind him. Faro Nell trailed the men, with Nugget. She kept
an extremely sharp eye upon the cub. He was a baby, still. He only
weighed six hundred pounds. And of course she watched against
danger from the rear.
Overhead, Semper fluttered and flew in giant circles and spirals,
never going very far away. Huyghens referred constantly to the
screen which showed what the air-borne camera saw. The image
tilted and circled and banked and swayed. It was by no means the
best air-reconnaissance that could be imagined. But it was the best
that would work. Presently Huyghens said:
"We swing to the right, here. The going's bad straight ahead, and it
looks like a pack of sphexes has killed and is feeding."
Roane was upset. He was dissatisfied with himself. So he said:
"It's against reason for carnivores to be as thick as you say! There
has to be a certain amount of other animal life for every meat-eating
beast! Too many of them would eat all the game and starve!"
"They're gone all winter," explained Huyghens, "which around here
isn't as severe as you might think. And a good many animals seem to
breed just after the sphexes go south. Also, the sphexes aren't
around all the warm weather. There's a sort of peak, and then for a
matter of weeks you won't see a one of them, and suddenly the
jungle swarms with them again. Then, presently, they head south.
Apparently they're migratory in some fashion, but nobody knows." He
said dryly: "There haven't been many naturalists around on this
planet. The animal life is inimical."
Roane fretted. He was a senior officer in the Colonial Survey, and he
was accustomed to arrival at a partly or completely-finished colonial
set-up, and to pass upon the completion or noncompletion of the
planned installation as designed. Now he was in an intolerably hostile
environment, depending upon an illegal colonist for his life, engaged
upon a demoralizingly indefinite enterprise—because the mechanical
spark-signal could be working long after its constructors were dead—
and his ideas about a number of matters were shaken. He was alive,
for example, because of three giant Kodiak bears and a bald eagle.
He and Roane could have been surrounded by ten thousand robots,
and they'd have been killed. Sphexes and robots would have ignored
each other, and sphexes would have made straight for the men,
who'd have had less than four seconds in which to discover for
themselves that they were attacked, prepare to defend themselves,
and kill eight sphexes.
Roane's convictions as a civilized man were shaken. Robots were
marvelous contrivances for doing the expected: accomplishing the
planned; coping with the predicted. But they also had defects. Robots
could only follow instructions—if this thing happens, do this, if that
thing happens do that. But before something else, neither this or that,
robots were helpless. So a robot civilization worked only in an
environment where nothing unanticipated ever turned up, and human
supervisors never demanded anything unexpected. Roane was
appalled. He'd never encountered the truly unpredictable before in all
his life and career.
He found Nugget, the cub, ambling uneasily in his wake. The cub
flattened his ears miserably when Roane glanced at him. It occurred
to the man that Nugget was receiving a lot of disciplinary thumpings
from Faro Nell. He was knocked about physically, pretty much as
Roane was being knocked about psychologically. His lack of
information and unfitness for independent survival in this environment
was being hammered into him.
"Hi, Nugget," said Roane ruefully. "I feel just about the way you do!"
Nugget brighted visibly. He frisked. He tended to gambol. He looked
very hopefully up into Roane's face—and he stood four feet high at
the shoulder and would overtop Roane if he stood erect.
Roane reached out and patted Nugget's head. It was the first time in
all his life that he'd ever petted an animal.
He heard a snuffling sound behind him. Skin crawled at the back of
his neck. He whirled.
Faro Nell regarded him—eighteen hundred pounds of she-bear only
ten feet away and looking into his eyes. For one panicky instant
Roane went cold all over. Then he realized that Faro Nell's eyes were
not burning. She was not snarling. She did not emit those blood-
curdling sounds which the bare prospect of danger to Nugget had
produced up on the rocky spur. She looked at him blandly. In fact,
after a moment she swung off on some independent investigation of a
matter that had aroused her curiosity.

The traveling party went on, Nugget frisking beside Roane and
tending to bump into him out of pure cub-clumsiness. Now and again
he looked adoringly at Roane, in the instant and overwhelming
affection of the very young.
Roane trudged on. Presently he glanced behind again. Faro Nell was
now ranging more widely. She was well satisfied to have Nugget in
the immediate care of a man. From time to time he got on her nerves.
A little while later, Roane called ahead.
"Huyghens! Look here! I've been appointed nursemaid to Nugget!"
Huyghens looked back.
"Oh, slap him a few times and he'll go back to his mother."
"The devil I will!" said Roane querulously. "I like it!"
The traveling party went on.
When night fell, they camped. There could be no fire, of course,
because all the minute night-things about would come eagerly to
dance in the glow. But there could not be darkness, equally, because
night-walkers hunted in the dark. So Huyghens set out the barrier
lamps which made a wall of twilight about their halting place, and the
staglike creature Faro Nell had carried became their evening meal.
Then they slept—at least the men did—and the bears dozed and
snorted and waked and dozed again. But Semper sat immobile with
his head under his wing on a tree limb. And presently there was a
glorious cool hush and all the world glowed in morning light diffused
through the jungle by a newly risen sun. And they arose, and traveled
again.
This day they stopped stock-still for two hours while sphexes puzzled
over the trail the bears had left. Huyghens discoursed calmly on the
need for an anti-scent, to be used on the boots of men and the paws
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