Károly, Krisztina (2017): Aspects of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation: The case of Hungarian-English news translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 269 p.

This book is a technical but engaging study of the way that certain types of cohesion and coherence are (re)produced in translation. Károly has developed an innovative approach to studying cohesion and coherence in translated texts. The approach stems from an interdisciplinary perspective which allows her to apply tools used in discourse analysis to the study of translated texts. The work will be of particular value for scholars interested in cohesion and coherence in translation, and I can easily imagine other scholars using the model developed and illustrated by Károly to analyze other corpora and text types. Scholars interested in news translation as a genre, however, have less to learn from this book. It does not, and nor is it meant to, constitute a study of Hungarian-English news translation per se. The book begins with a short foreword which is itself followed by an equally short introduction. The foreword places the study in a wider research context, lying between translation studies and discourse analysis, while addressing “neglected or under researched” (p. IX) questions. It also outlines the main fields to which the work contributes: discourse analysis, genre studies and translation studies, wherein “[t]he most significant contribution of this study is to the field of target text oriented translation research” (p. XI). The introduction then offers an overview of the study by briefly outlining the research focus, the aims and research questions, the corpus, as well as the theoretical framework. The importance of the methodological contribution of this book clearly emerges at this stage: From a structural perspective, it would almost certainly have been preferable to combine the foreword and introduction, but they nevertheless perform the function of contextualizing and setting up the study. The second chapter of the book provides a very detailed account of the theoretical background to the study and to the Complex Translational Discourse Analysis (CTDA) model that is developed here. The structure of the chapter is somewhat unusual, but it is broadly divided in two parts: the first part deals with translation and the second with cohesion, while the CTDA model is described right in the middle (section 2.3.2). As Károly notes, the model is based on theories that “were originally developed for the English language and for the analysis of ‘independent’ texts” (p. 52) so the main innovation lies in the development of a model capable of treating translated texts alongside the originals. It is also worth noting that Károly describes the CTDA model as “complex” “since it contains all of the discourse structural components of coherence that create continuity in discourse” and “includes all the theories and methods necessary for their identification and description” (p. 52). The wording is perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but it nevertheless underscores a major benefit of the model: it lets the scholar examine a range of different components of coherence at once, and allows us – as Károly does in the final chapter – to explore interactions between the various levels. The corpus used to examine coherence and cohesion is described in the third chapter. It consists of 20 “‘summary’ sections of translated English analytical news articles and their corresponding Hungarian originals retrieved from the website of Budapest Analyses” published between 2004 and 2008 (p. 99). Translation scholars in general, and scholars of news translation in particular, are likely to find fault with the corpus design. Most obviously, at 6618 words, the corpus is very small. Károly acknowledges this and attributes it to “the extremely laborious and meticulous nature of the investigations” and to the “amount of data” that these texts represent for the kind of analysis being …