Peter Newmark – författare

Peter Newmark's third book is an attempt to deepen and extend his views on translation. He goes easy on theories and models and diagrams and offers a few correlative statements to assist translators in finding a variety of options and in making their decisions. He discusses political concepts, linguistic interference and the role of words and discourse in translation. There are chapters on teaching translation, teaching about translation and the reasons for the growing international importance of translation. Finally Professor Newmark insists on the distinction between cultural and universal aspects of language, and sees translation as a critical and sometimes cruelly truthful weapon in exposing language, culture and literature. Peter Newmark's views on translation are controversial; as a compensation he offers an abundance of interesting translation examples.

Peter Newmark's fourth book on translation, a collection of his articles in The Linguist, is addressed to a wide readership. He discusses the force of translation in public life, instancing health and social services, art galleries, operas, light magazines and even gives some hints on the translation of erotica. The major part of these paragraphs is concerned with straight translation topics such as economics texts and short stories, as well as procedures for translating quotations, symbols, phrasal verbs and nouns, synonymous sound effects in language, repetition and keywords. The subordination of translation not just to source or target language but to logic, the facts, ideas of right and wrong, as well as the translator's ideology, is also discussed. However controversial, the author always provides an abundance of examples for the reader to test his ideas.