Translation through grammar

Alltranslation is a compromise-the effort to be literal and the e. ffort to be idiomatic BenjaminJowett (1817-93) This book is designed to provide intermediate and advanced students of English with practice in the translation ofDutch texts into English. It contains fifty prose passages, most of them taken from recent Dutch novels or journals, all of them tried out on several generations of our own students in the 'pre-kandidaatsfase' of their studies at the English Department of the University of Nijmegen. In these respects, it is not spectacularly different from many other books ofits kind. We have, however, tried to offer the student rather more support in his translation work than is usually clone: each text is provided with a suggested translation of the first few lines and with notes containing information on grammar and idiom, sometimes preceded by supplementary material from British or American sources. The second part of the book comprises a short contrastive grammar speciallywritten to meet theneeds oftheuser. In this way wehope to offer a self-contained translation course which reinforces the interdependence of grammar, vocabulary, textual interpretation and style. Most ofthe texts in this book are reproduced in substantially the sameform and wording as in the original sources. In some cases editing was necessary in order, for example, to reduce long articles to more manageable proportions. In no cases, however, were we moved to doctor the originals in order to disambiguate them or to make them easier to translate.