Rezension: CHRISTOPH GUTKNECHT and LUTZ J. RÖLLE, Translating by Factors

Students of translation always have to deal with the question of how "literal" their rendition of a text into another language should be, and sometimes it may appear to them that it is their teacher who decides what constitutes an acceptable "transfer of meaning." Clearly, texts are characterized by many different grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic features--some of which may not be explicit and certainly not obvious--that need to be taken into account to produce a "satisfactory" translation. The process of identifying, assessing, and weighting of the source language (SL) text features should ideally result in a reduplicable matrix for which grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic equivalencies can be found in the target language (TL). Gutknecht and Rölle's Translating by Factors endeavors to establish such a matrix of factors governing the production of a given text which may serve as the basis for a rendition into the target language.