Book review: Linguistics for Translators by Ali Almanna and Juliane House

The book Linguistics for Translators, coauthored by Ali Almanna and Juliane House, represents an in-depth exploration of how linguistic theory intersects with translation practices. Its goal is to equip translators with a comprehensive understanding of key linguistic domains. It covers essential areas of linguistics, including phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, illustrating how each field contributes to more accurate and effective translations. The authors present practical examples and highlight multilingual perspectives, focusing on languages such as English, German, Arabic, French, and Chinese, thus enabling them to identify the challenges and nuances associated with translating between languages that feature different syntactic, morphological, and phonological systems. This work emphasizes the importance of understanding sociolinguistic variations and cultural contexts, and it offers strategies that can be used to manage dialects, registers, and idiomatic expressions while maintaining the intended meaning and tone across different languages. It also explores cognitive linguistics, particularly with respect to how language reflects thought processes, which can help translators preserve the conceptual and metaphorical meanings of source texts. While this book excels in its presentation of linguistic theories and their applications, it also has certain limitations, including a strong emphasis on theoretical concepts, which may be challenging for readers seeking more practical translation exercises. Additionally, this book’s coverage is somewhat narrow with respect to modern technological tools, including computer-assisted translation, machine translation (MT), and artificial intelligence (AI) translation, which are increasingly relevant in the translation industry. Overall, by encouraging readers to consider both the cultural norms and cognitive patterns that shape language use, this work serves as a valuable resource for translators, as it provides theoretical insights and practical examples that help them navigate idiomatic expressions, cultural references, and conceptual differences across languages to produce more accurate, culturally sensitive, and cognitively informed translations.