More than just a book about translation--also includes theories of language and meaning. Very dense in spots. Personally had hoped for a little more history and modern day accounts of translation but that was my preference only. A challenging book that requires the reader to pay close attention.
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Interesting. Perhaps a bit too philosophical and dense for casual reading, but if you are interested in the topic there are many interesting discussions of translation from spontaneous to literary. ( )

I'm not familiar with David Bellos or his work, but having seen the promo video for this book - see here - I found the message so witty and interesting that it instantly made me want to read "Is That A Fish In Your Ear?".

While I'm not active in the field of translation - although I am confronted with writings in French and German in my day-job - but from time to time appeal to my colleagues who ARE translators, I wanted to find out more about... translating from one language into another, what one has to pay attention to, how it occurs, what subtleties there are, and so on. Another reason was that we (my colleagues and I) regularly play word/language games, which keeps things interesting, jolly and whatever more.

David Bellos thus treats the different aspects of translation in his newest book. What translation is, the different meanings of the word, how translation takes place, how it's done properly, where translation is applied, how it came to be used to massively in our society, and so on, and so forth. That also includes the role of dictionaries, machine translation (Google Translate, for example), etc. And why English (and French, for instance) are so dominant.

It's a perfect book to learn about translation in the broad sense. And of course the importance of translation! David Bellos doesn't go into the various details of translating itself, rather offers a broad view on it and what you could consider the richness of each language (be it in Europe, Asia, and so on). It made me have much more respect for everyone active in this field, not just the people translating books or documents, but also the interpreters working for the EU, for example.

Not every chapter was as interesting as the other, to me at least, but nevertheless, the author kept the text accessible and witty enough for a large audience to understand it all. He did use some English words I have never read or heard in my entire life, but that makes it also interesting, as perhaps I can use them to enhance my vocabulary. ( )

We use translations all the time in our ordinary lives and seem to take their usefulness and value for granted — even the most xenophobic American is likely to read from a translation at least once a week without ever reflecting on the fact that it is a translation — yet translators, if Bellos is anything to go by, seem to have the idea that nobody loves them. Admittedly, we do toss around clichés like "never as good as the original" and "poetry is what gets lost in translation". Many of us are prepared to read books in languages we understand imperfectly rather than trusting someone else to clarify them for us. We love to share pictures of hilariously mistranslated notices found in Asian hotels. And theorists of language have shown convincingly that it is impossible to translate meaning from one language into another anyway, and generally rejected the validity of the whole idea of translation.

In this loosely-linked collection of essays on the history and practice of translation, Bellos sets out to demolish those philosophical windmills and show us that his craft is possible, useful and necessary. He does so wittily and engagingly, but doesn't always quite manage to quell our suspicion that they were only windmills in the first place. The core of his argument, really, is that translation isn't about transferring exact semantic content, but about creating likeness, transferring the functional effect of a text. The reader of a translated instruction manual must be able to perform the task being instructed; the reader of a treaty must know what's been agreed; the reader of a novel must be entertained, informed and moved in ways that are sufficiently like the ways the original operates.

There's also a lot of very interesting information here about the things we translate and don't translate, the use of widely-understood "vehicle" languages like English and French, the difference between translations into languages with large numbers of powerful speakers and into those spoken by small groups of relatively powerless people, the (dying?) black art of simultaneous interpretation in conferences, the mysterious appearance of a pisang tree in a Bible translation, the curiously low status literary translation has in the English-speaking world, and lots of other fascinating topics.

Judging by the other reviews of this book, this is an area where linguists have deeply entrenched positions, and Bellos hasn't convinced many of them, but for non-combatants it's an entertaining and informative look into a world we normally only see through the material it produces.

(I also loved the way Bellos doesn't bother to explain the Douglas Adams allusion in his title until nearly 300 pages into the book: anyone who hasn't grown up knowing about such things clearly has no business reading a book like this!) ( )

My whole life, I've had an ongoing love affair with language! I love to explore the boundaries of what it can do, all the ways to subvert and break and leverage the "rules". Translation, in particular, has been something that fascinates me. I'm monolingual and have very little skill in acquiring new languages - but I want so much to know what other languages can do! What thoughts they can think that English can't! I depend on good translations to discover the literature, culture, and ideas of other language groups.

I'm one of those people who tries to get multiple English translations of the same work, just to compare and contrast them, to see if that can help me to isolate the essence of the original.

So when I heard about a book that explores the nature of translation, with a title that references The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, of course I had to read it!

This book wasn't what I expected. The pre-reviews I'd read and the book trailer I'd seen led me to expect something along the line of Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, with a similar populism and quirky sense of humor.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? turned out to be a much more academic and scholarly work than the reviews led me to believe.

Trust me - this isn't a bad thing.

David Bellos brings a very unique perspective to the subject. He obviously understands and is thoroughly educated in the history and theory of translation, but he also knows how to approach issues (both theoretical and practical) from the perspective of someone who does translation, day-in and day-out. This isn't just an intellectual debate for him - there are real-world implications, and real-world solutions, regardless of what the prevailing theories may say. This book is a wonderful marriage of those two perspectives.

It does mean that the book can be a bit abstruse. He does well at avoiding too much specialized vocabulary, and the more esoteric phrases he does use he defines clearly in layman's terms. But, like with all intellectual disciplines, there are ways of thinking - paradigms, structures of logic, patterns of thought and argument - that aren't always easily comprehended by someone not educated in the discipline, no matter how well the author writes it all in common vocabulary.

However, for anyone who has more than a passing interest in language and translation, I don't think there's anything in this book that can't be mastered. And it is a marvelous overview of the nature of the act of translation, and, indeed, the nature of language itself!

My only real complaint is this - I read the iBooks version and there are links throughout the book to other sections where he discusses similar concepts and issues: "See" and "See Also" references made into clickable links. I love that ebooks can do this! The problem is the text they used for these links - for example, the phrase, "previously discussed see here of this book" is just plain awkward. This type of link text formulation appears throughout. Somebody really needs to go through the e-version and redo them. ( )